Analysis of narrow wall slots in a rectangular waveguide excited by tilted wires using the virtual cylinder method

Rectangular waveguide slot arrays are commonly used in several microwave antenna systems. The slots are most often located in the broad wall of the rectangular waveguide, arranged longitudinally parallel with the waveguide axis, because this provides good control of the excitation of each slot over a large dynamic range by adjusting the offset of the slot from the center line of the waveguide. However, longitudinal slots can only radiate electrical fields that are transversely polarized with respect to the waveguide axis. If longitudinal (or dual) polarization is required, the slots (or half of them) must be located transverse to the waveguide axis. Transverse resonant slots in the broad wall are too strongly excited for use in large arrays, so transverse narrow slots in the narrow wall are preferred. In the latter case the slots are not excited unless they are tilted or coupled to tilted parasitic elements like wires or posts inside the waveguide. The purpose of the present paper is to analyse an untilted narrow wall slot excited by two tilted wires. An improved and extended analysis in which the slot extensions into the neighboring two broad walls are included, is described. The virtual cylinder method is applied to the calculation of the external admittances of the slot using wedge dyadic Green´s functions and entire-domain basis functions in order to get good convergence of the integrals of the spectral domain formulations.