Compact Planar Antenna Array for X-Band Communication Applications

A compact planar microstrip antenna array with low side-lobe and low profile is presented in this paper. The array unit is composed of two dielectric substrates layers, which enhance the peak gain in the main direction. The double-layer microstrip antenna unit achieves a gain of 8.7 dBi. While the whole antenna array is combined of 24 units, which feeding network is integrated on the same layer with the driven patches. The 24-elements planar array has achieved side lobe levels (SLLs) lower than 20.6 dB for both the phi=0 deg and phi=90 deg planes. The simulated results also reveal that the proposed antenna array achieves good impedance matching (VSWR ≤ 1.3) and gain performance (peak gain 21.5 dBi) from 9.3 to 9.9 GHz. Overall dimension of the proposed microstrip planar antenna array is 3.55λ
0
×5.12λ
0
×0.30λ
0
at 9.6 GHz.