A Wideband L-Probe Fed Conformal Antenna Array Using Metasurface

Abstract

A wideband conformal metasurface (MTS) antenna array with high gain is designed in this paper. The cooperation of the MTS and L-probe feeding of the antenna element realizes a wide bandwidth of 28.1%, which exhibits only one resonant mode. Then, the planar and conformal arrays consisting of 4× 8 MTS antenna elements are investigated. The planar and conformal antenna arrays are fabricated and measured. The measured result shows that when the bending angle θ ≤ 10, unidirectional radiation and high gain can be maintained. The planar antenna array shows a measured impedance bandwidth (IMBW) of 2.81-3.76 GHz (0.95 GHz, 29.7%), with a peak gain of 22.2 dBi, and the conformal antenna array for the bending angle of 10° exhibits an IMBW of 2.8-3.63 GHz (0.82 GHz, 25.6%), with a peak gain of 20.2 dBi.