A Mechanically Reconfigurable Reflectarray With Slotted Patches of Tunable Height

Design of a C-band reconfigurable reflectarray antenna (RRA) is presented. The RRA element consists of a fixed upper patch and a tunable slotted patch. By mechanically controlling the height of the slotted patch, the RRA element has a phase shift range of 324° with small element loss. A prototype with 408 elements is designed and fabricated. The measurements show that the gain of the 20° scanned beam is 25.7 dB and the aperture efficiency is 48.6%. The large-angle beam-scanning capability of the RRA is also verified within ±60° angular range, and well-defined scanned beams are obtained with maximum scan gain loss of 3.4 dB.