Design of a multiband printed LPDA for weather radar reflector systems

CASULA, GIOVANNI ANDREA

2015-01-01

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Abstract

A printed Log-periodic dipole array (LPDA) is presented as a multiband feed for reflector antennas in weather radar applications. The antenna has been designed starting from Carrel’s theory, optimized using CST Microwave Studio 2012, and then realized. The comparison between simulated and measured results shows that the proposed antenna can be used for weather radar applications both in the S (2.7-3 GHz) and C (5.4-5.8 GHz) frequency bands, with a very good input matching and a satisfactory end-fire radiation pattern. Moreover, it has a compact size, is very easy to realize, and presents an excellent out-of-band rejection, without the use of stop-band filters, thus avoiding interferences out of the weather radars' operating frequency band. In order to obtain the same beamwidth both in E-plane and H-plane, a V-shaped configuration is proposed, which allows to improve the aperture efficiency of a reflector antenna fed by the presented LPDA.