Design of a Printed Dipole Antenna Array for a Passive Radar System

Abstract

Passive radar (or Passive Coherent Localisation) is an advancing technology for covert operation. The signal transmitted from sources of opportunity such as radio or TV stations is used as illumination for a certain area of interest. Part of the transmitted signal is reflected by radar targets, for example, moving objects such as vehicles or aircraft. Typical radar parameters are derived from the comparison between the direct line-of-sight from the transmitter and the signal scattered from the target object. Such systems are an attractive addition to existing active radar stations because they have the potential to discover low-flying and low-observable targets and no active radar transmitter is required. Printed dipole antennas are very attractive antenna elements for such systems because of their easy fabrication, low-cost, polarisation purity, and low-profile properties. The present paper describes the design of an antenna array using printed dipole elements with flared arms for a passive radar system operating in the GSM900 frequency range. Isolated antenna elements and a small uniform linear antenna array were designed and optimised using computational electromagnetic methods. Several prototypes have been fabricated on conventional microwave PCB substrate material. Preliminary measurement results for antenna matching and far-field radiation patterns are shown.

Cavity-Backed Angled-Dipole Antennas for Millimeter-Wave Wireless Applications

“…The beamwidth difference of the angled-dipole antenna can be mitigated by using a corrugated ground plane [9], but this method is accompanied by a significant reduction in impedance bandwidth. In [10], another angled-dipole antenna employed a planar metallic reflector to improve the antenna gain. However, its pattern profile is not symmetric due to the asymmetry of the design.…”

“…Planar printed antennas have gained interest for millimeter-wave phased array applications because of their wide bandwidth, low cost, ease of fabrication, and potential for high-efficiency operation [7][8][9][10]. A printed-dipole antenna using a microstrip-fed coplanar strip T-junction was designed for a Ka-band phased array [7].…”

Development of 4-Elements Printed Dipole Array for RF Energy Harvesting Application

“…Planar dipole-based antenna has been explored for many years, mainly for communication applications. These include the utilization of such antenna for wireless sensor [1], radar [2], RFID [3]- [5], dual-band application [6]- [7], and even has been proposed for 5G application [8]. In [9], planar dipole antenna was investigated and developed in a flexible substrate, which might be suitable for wearable antenna application.…”

Design of a Directional Microstrip Antenna at UHF-Band for Passive Radar Application

“…Recently, passive radar can attract considerable interest of people due to its several advantages if compared with active system. Specifically, because a passive radar does not transmit, it is naturally convert and offers high tolerance to electronic countermeasure (ECM), it does not require additional spectrum and has been widely considered as a unique sensing capability to manage the radio spectrum congestion problem [2][3]. Passive radar can be generally classified into two categories, which are reference channel (RC) and surveillance channel (SC).…”

“…Frequency used is UHF (476-806 MHz) [7], in accordance with the regulation of TV broadcast spectrum in Indonesia. Antenna microstrip for passive radar applications have been made by Peter Knott [2], but uses an array method to obtain a large gain while in this research uses director and reflector to obtain a large gain.…”