Thick Vivaldi antenna for focal plane applications

This communication deals with the design of metal only thick Vivaldi antenna, hollow inside to host a Low Noise Amplifier adjacent to the antenna, that is suitable to focal plane array devoted to radio astronomy. The impedance frequency band of the array goes from 0.75 GHz to 1.5 GHz and has a half-power beam width of 60 degrees over the same frequency band. Numerical simulations have been carried out to study the radiation patterns using the Method-of-Moments approach for infinite array simulations, followed by the implementation of fast numerical methods combining the Array Scanning Method with Macro basis Functions for the simulation of an array consisting of 5x5 elements.