Mechanical beam-steerable elliptical dome lens

This paper presents a new mechanical beam steering antenna concept, consisting of a collimated beam lens which pivots in front of a single stationary feed, without the use of rotary joints. An elliptical dome lens is used to form the collimated beam since it enables to point it along the lens axis, almost independently from its orientation with respect to the stationary feed axis. Simple tilting of the lens and its rotation about the feed axis allows elevation and azimuth scan of the beam. A prototype was designed to use the unlicensed spectrum from 57 GHz to 66 GHz, with an overall gain above 20 dBi. The antenna presents an acceptable 2 dB scanning loss when tilting the beam from -25deg to 25deg. The solution is simple, low cost and compact, with a reduced size of 3times3times3 cm³ and weighing just 5 g.