Design & Development of Single Layer Corporate Fed Monopulse Planar Array Antenna

Abstract

Monopulse antenna systems are employed to determine direction-of-arrival (DoA) where the angle of arrival (AoA) is measured on a single pulse. One of the most significant advantages of this type of system is its speed of operation since all of the necessary computations are performed in the hardware and are instantaneously available. In this thesis, a simple and compact 2x2 microstrip square shaped antenna elements is designed at X-Band which is comprised of only two rat-race couplers as a mono-pulse comparator for tracking radar applications. This system provides sum and difference patterns in both azimuth and elevation planes for the accurate tracking of targets. A circularly polarized antenna is employed for sum pattern to avoid polarization loss among sum and difference patterns. The design is fabricated and the measured results matches the simulation results to great extent. The -10 dB bandwidth of the antennas in azimuth and elevation is 200 MHz and 264 MHz respectively. The sum pattern has gain of 9 dBi in azimuth and elevation at frequency of 10.35 GHz. The null depth in azimuth is -29 dB and -30 dB in elevation with respect to gain of antenna.