Low-profile tunable and steerable fabry-perot antenna for software defined radio applications

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a flexible radio architecture programmed through software, which is reconfigured depending on the usage scenario. SDR consists of a programmable hardware base that is controlled through software. In this paper a subwavelength tunable and steerable Fabry-Perot antennas is analyzed. This antenna consists of a low-profile resonant cavity created by a frequency selective surface placed in close proximity of an active high-impedance surface. The active ground plane is synthesized by loading the high-impedance surface with varactors. Such antenna allows both tuning the high-gain operation frequency and obtaining a beam steering in correspondence of each frequency. For the mentioned characteristics and the simplicity of its realization the structure results suitable for software defined radio and cognitive radio applications.