A wide-scan printed planar K-band microwave lens

Microwave lenses are an attractive option for switched beam antenna systems because several beams can share a single aperture. Of particular interest are printed planar lenses due to their light weight, low volume, and ease of fabrication. Several researchers have developed such lenses using two different methods. The first method is to connect the antennas on the transmit and receive side with delay lines to obtain the appropriate phase response (McGrath, D.T., 1986; Popovic, D. and Popovic, Z., 2002; Pozar, D.M., 1996). The second, the antenna-filter-antenna (AFA) method, is to couple the antennas resonantly on the transmit and receive side forming a bandpass filter response and to scale the unit cells to obtain the desired phase response (Abbaspour-Tamijani, A. et al., IEEE AP-S Symp. Dig., p.675-8, 2004). In a switched beam system, it is often desired to have a wide scan angle. A K-band lens is presented with at least ±50° scanning in both the E-plane and the H-plane and no grating lobes using the AFA concept.