Higher Spatial Harmonic Leaky Wave Antenna Design Based on Meandering Microstrips

A Leaky Wave Antenna (LWA) design with high scanning rate (the ratio of beam scanning range and bandwidth) is proposed in this work. The antenna is based on a periodic meandering microstrip line operating in K-Band with continuous beam scanning from backward-to-forward direction in the elevation plane. The height of the transverse lines is varied periodically in the unit cell to increase the electrical length. Hence, the antenna operates in higher spatial order which increases the scanning rate. The final antenna shows a scanning range in the elevation plane from −40° to 45° in the frequency range from 20.6 GHz to 24.6 GHz corresponding to a scanning rate of 21.25 ° GHz
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. The antenna performance is compared with conventional meandering leaky wave antenna design to demonstrate notable increase in the scanning rate with very less impact on gain while also maintaining low profile.