A 5-by-5 element coupled oscillator-based phased array

Design, fabrication, and test of a 25-element planar coupled oscillator based phased array is described. The array operates at S-band and is shown to produce an agile beam which is steerable via adjustment of the perimeter oscillator tuning biases only. A phase diagnostic system is described which displays the aperture phase distribution during the far field measurements of the radiated beam. Measured results are presented both with and without the diagnostic system present. Without the diagnostic system, the beam pointing was achieved by setting the perimeter oscillator biases to be values previously used in the measurements with the diagnostic system present. The far field was then measured without the benefit of a knowledge of the aperture phase distribution. Finally, the results of far field measurements are described in which the beam position was incremented from a position previously measured with the diagnostic system in place to a new position by incrementing the perimeter oscillator biases by a fixed amount.