Cross Fed Printed Aerials

The design of a simple printed planar array to replace horns in short range domestic radar and traffic control systems is described. The essential criterion is to keep the basic material and processing costs low, whilst retaining a necessary specified aerial performance. Cross-fed aerials use a novel diagonal fed array of microstrip radiating elements to control the beamwidth and side lobe levels, together with fibreg1ass or polymer materials and photoetching techniques to keep the cost low. Good efficiencies for frequencies up to 14GHz have been demonstrated with aerial gains from 10 to 25dB.