Experimental Investigation of Wide-Angle Impedance Matching of Phased Array Using Overlapped Feeding Network

In this letter, a microstrip phased array adopting an overlapped feeding network in order to achieve wide-angle impedance matching is proposed. A 1 × 16 phased array prototype has been designed and fabricated for experimental verification. Coupling coefficients and active element patterns for all the radiating elements have been measured to calculate the active reflection coefficients and to synthesize the array radiation patterns. Simulated and measured results show that the investigated method is effective to improve the impedance matching over a wide scan range compared to conventional impedance-matching techniques. Due to the improved impedance matching especially at large angles, the array can experimentally scan to ±60^° with a gain decrease lower than 3 dB.