Design, Manufacturing and Test of a Dual-Reflectarray Antenna With Improved Bandwidth and Reduced Cross-Polarization

A dual-offset reflectarray demonstrator has been designed, manufactured and tested for the first time. In the antenna configuration presented in this paper, the feed, the sub-reflectarray and the main-reflectarray are in the near field one to each other, so that the conventional approximations of far field are not suitable for the analysis of this antenna. The antenna is designed by considering the near-field radiated by the horn and the contributions from all the elements in the sub-reflectarray to compute the required phase-shift on each element of the main reflectarray. Both reflectarrays have been designed using broad-band elements based on variable-size patches in a single layer for the main reflectarray and two layers for the sub-reflectarray, incident field. The measured radiation patterns are in good agreement with the simulated results. It is also demonstrated that a reduction of the cross-polarization in the antenna is achieved by adjusting the patch dimensions. The antenna measurements exhibit a 20% bandwidth (12.2 GHz-15 GHz) (with a reduction of gain less than 2.5 dB) and a cross-polar discrimination better than 30 dB in the working frequency band.