Summary
International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation
2008
Session Number:4C33
Session:
Number:4C33-3
Configuration and Radiation Characteristics of Soccer Ball Type Array Antenna
Ayako TAKAHASHI, Toshikazu HORI, Mitoshi FUJIMOTO, Kiyotake ANDO, Yozo TAKEDA,
pp.-
Publication Date:2008/10/27
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
A conformal array antenna arranged on the curved surface features to steer a beam in the hemisphere. As such a conformal array antenna, a spherical array arranged on a sphere has been studied, so as to apply to a mobile antenna for mobile satellite communications [1][2][3]. However, many elements are required to realize both performance of high gain and wide beam steering [4]. Therefore, it is necessary to arrange the antenna elements uniformly on a sphere in order to obtain a higher coverage gain. A polyhedron is suited for arranging the antenna element uniformly [5]. For that reason, we examined about a polyhedral array antenna arranged on the polyhedron. It is clarified that a soccer ball type antenna is suitable for the polyhedron to achieve the higher minimum coverage gain [6]. This paper describes the configuration of a soccer ball type array antenna arranged on a polyhedron so as to steer a beam. Here, the soccer ball type antenna is composed of sub-arrays, and the sub-array is composed of several antenna elements arranged on a co-plane. In order to extend the steering angle of the sub array, a phase control for each sub array is introduced. The purpose of the phase control is to achieve higher coverage gain than that of antenna when antenna elements switched one by one. The minimum coverage gain of proposed soccer ball type antenna with phase control is introduced. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed array antenna is verified by experiments.