A miniaturization technique for wideband tightly coupled phased arrays

Using an equivalent circuit, a new wideband array was examined using physically realizable tightly coupled dipoles. A miniaturized element using inductive and capacitive loading was used to suppress ground plane effects for a broadband conformal array. Serial inductance was demonstrated to effectively miniaturize the radiating element and lead to even greater bandwidth as compared to the CSA array in the work of Munk et al. (2003). A 4.5:1 bandwidth was demonstrated with a dipole length of lambda₀/10 and a total array thickness of lambda₀/12.8 at the lowest operating frequency.