A miniaturised frontend for Ka-band radar applications

This paper presents a four quadrants monopulse frontend including a waveguide slot array antenna. The frontend has an extreme high level of integration due to the use of modern multilayer technologies. The applications for such frontends are imaging systems and military seekerheads operating in Ka-band. The size of the realised frontend is less than 80 mm in diameter and has an overall weight of less than 210 grams including the antenna. Even though this frontend is very small, nevertheless it provides an output power of more than 6 watts realised by means of spatial combining the four quadrants. Also in the receive mode remarkable measurement results were achieved. The SSB noise figure of the frontend is about 6 dB.