Radar cross section reduction for microstrip antenna using broadband chessboard artificial magnetic conductor structure

In this paper, a novel design to reduce radar cross section (RCS) for microstrip antenna with a chessboard structure is proposed. The chessboard structure is composed by two different types of artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) unit cells which exhibits 180° phase difference. It can dramatically reduce the antenna RCS in a broadband including the in band and out of band from 12 to 24GHz. Compared with the reference antenna, the proposed antenna shows RCS reduction larger than 10dB, and the maximum reduction can reach more than 36dB. In addition, the radiation performance of the proposed antenna is preserved well.