A novel design methodology is presented to mitigate scan blindness in cavity antenna arrays without the need for any changes on the radiating structure itself. For a first proof-of-concept demonstration, a fully PCB-compliant dual-polarized cavity element is loaded by vertical stubs to manipulate the dispersion characteristics in the aperture plane. In contrast with its conventional cavity antenna counterpart, the proposed stub-loaded unit cell element shows through scattering and eigenmode analysis that the vertical stubs may effectively enhance the antenna’s wide-angle scan performance by preventing the onset of surface and leaky wave resonances. Owing to this additional design freedom, an element gain improvement of at least 1 dB is achieved, due to a truly TE and TM mode-free characteristic along the lateral directions. A dual-polarized 11 ×\times 11 array prototype was implemented. The measurement results are in very good agreement with those obtained by full-wave simulations. The realized stub-loaded cavity element exhibits reflection coefficients lower than −10 dB with a very low inter-port coupling <−40 dB across the frequency range from 26.8 GHz to 32.7 GHz. Moreover, the co-polarized embedded elements are close to the ideal cos( ϑ\vartheta )-pattern for 60° E- and H-plane scans from 28 GHz to 31.5 GHz without oversampling the aperture.

中文翻译：

---

新型广角扫描短截线加载腔阵元的设计与分析


提出了一种新颖的设计方法来减轻腔体天线阵列中的扫描盲性，而不需要对辐射结构本身进行任何改变。在首次概念验证演示中，完全符合 PCB 标准的双偏振腔元件由垂直短截线加载，以控制孔径平面中的色散特性。与传统的腔体天线相比，所提出的短截线加载单元元件通过散射和本征模分析表明，垂直短截线可以通过防止表面和漏波谐振的发生来有效增强天线的广角扫描性能。由于这种额外的设计自由度，由于沿横向方向具有真正的 TE 和 TM 模式特性，因此可以实现至少 1 dB 的元件增益改进。实现了双偏振 11 ×\times 11 阵列原型。测量结果与全波模拟获得的结果非常吻合。所实现的短截线加载腔元件在 26.8 GHz 至 32.7 GHz 的频率范围内表现出低于 -10 dB 的反射系数以及 <-40 dB 的极低端口间耦合。此外，对于 28 GHz 至 31.5 GHz 的 60° E 平面和 H 平面扫描，同极化嵌入式元件接近理想的 cos( ϑ\vartheta ) 方向图，且无需对孔径进行过采样。