Design of an Endfire Microstrip Antenna for Aircraft Collision Avoidance System

Traffic alert and collision avoidance system provides a solution to reduce the threat of mid-air collisions between civil aircraft. The endfire antenna is very much essential in such airborne system. In this letter, an antenna using planar elements is being developed, and the design of a prototype model for printed endfire microstrip antenna with four feeding ports is presented. An aerodynamically shaped conformal metamaterial lens-based radome is also designed to encapsulate the antenna inside an enclosure. Here, the suppression of surface wave in the antenna is taken place, which resulted in gain enhancement and also reduction of sidelobes. Hence, the shape of the radiation pattern is tuned as per requirement. The proposed antenna is capable of transmitting the electromagnetic waves toward 360° surveillance region of the aircraft with proper excitation of its feeding ports. The proposed antenna and its radome have been designed and subsequently simulated using CST Microwave Studio EM tool. The antenna fabrication and measurement are also carried out to validate the simulated antenna performance and other antenna characteristics. Quite excellent similarity is attained among all the simulated and experimental results.