Beam Steering 2D Leaky Wave Resonant Cavity Antenna for Ka-Band Satellite Communication

This paper presents a Ka-band beam-steering an-tenna system based on near-field metasurfaces. The antenna system comprises a 2D leaky wave resonant cavity antenna (RCA) and a pair of phase-gradient metasurfaces (PGMs) stacked above RCA in its near-field region. To improve the performance of the overall antenna system, we have investigated higher resolution PGMs that have smaller fundamental cells having a lateral periodicity of a quarter wavelength to reduce the phase quantization error. Instead of square patches, these cells have metal loops printed on thin substrates, reducing the overall weight of the PGMs. The predicted results indicate that the proposed antenna system can steer its beam within a conical region having an apex angle of 100 degrees without reducing gain by more than 3dB from the maximum gain of 16.6 dBi. The maximum height of the antenna, including the feed, is 1.65 times the free space wavelength.