Design of a Spherical Phased Array Based on Broadband Circularly Polarized Dipole Antenna

The spherical conformal array is of great interest to researchers because of its full-space scanning capability. However, to achieve excellent performance of beam scanning, the number of units to be motivated needs to be controlled. When all units are motivated simultaneously, there are some units whose maximum radiation direction is opposite to the beam scanning direction, so the back-lobe and side-lobe of the pattern raise and cause the deterioration of gain. In this paper, we propose to apply the broadband circularly polarized dipole antenna to the large-scale spherical conformal array and obtain excellent beam scanning performance by calculating the effective excitation areas. It can be applied to satellite communication, radar reconnaissance and other fields in practical engineering.