Printed high gain end-fire beam-steerable yagi antenna

In this paper a planar yagi antenna with beam-steering capability for high gain application is presented. A key performance highlight of the antenna is its ability to beam steer through 120° in the azimuth plane without using any phase shifters. The beam steering technique is demonstrated by using an antenna structure consisting of a printed half-wavelength driven element, a ground plane as a reflector, three directors and finally a rectangular grid of parasitic pixels placed directly in front of the directors and in the same layer. The adjacent pixels can be connected/disconnected by means of switching resulting in reconfigurability in beam-direction. The proposed antenna is capable to steer the end-fire beam radiation from −60° to +60°, in xy-plane (θ=90°). The bandwidth of the proposed antenna is approximately 200 MHz (8.2%) around the center frequency of 2.45 GHz with measured peak gains of 7.8–9.8 dBi. The designed antenna has been fabricated and measured to validate the results obtained by the theoretical analyses, genetic optimizations and simulations. Both simulation and experimental results has been provided.