Abstract
A leaky-wave antenna made of cavity-backed-slot radiating elements with open-stopband suppression is presented. The cavity-backed slots are seriesly fed by a strip. The bandwidth of the unit cell of the array is enhanced by a recently-proposed technique that uses a matching stub. The open-stopband effect is mitigated by misaligning the stub with respect to the slot. An array is designed and fabricated. The array is built using an aluminum set of cavities filled with 3D printed material to support the substrate where the feed and slots are etched. The measurement of the prototype shows the overall good performance of the array. The array is able to scan its beam from to 50 in the 2.8–4.4 GHz frequency range, keeping good matching even at the broadside frequency. The gain is stable over the band.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Prof. J. Esteban, from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), for helping with the measurement of the array and J. M. Romero-Romero for fabricating the 3D-printed material.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).