Innovative CTS antenna architecture for beam reconfiguration in E-plane

We present a high gain, low profile and reconfigurable Continuous Transverse Stub (CTS)antenna fed by two pillbox systems and a 3dB 180° coupler. The antenna system contains 16 radiating slots divided into two 8-slot sub-arrays. Such an architecture provides for the first time beam reconfiguration in E-plane. These concepts are validated experimentally in E-band (71-86GHz). The antenna module has been fabricated in Printed Circuit Board (PCB)technology; it is very compact and exhibits very good performance over the whole bandwidth with a maximum gain of 21.8dBi, a gain variation lower than 1.5dB, and an input matching level better than −18dB.