Orthogonal feeding techniques for tapered slot antennas

For arrays of a ´brick´ configuration, there are electrical and mechanical advantages to feed the antenna with a feed on a substrate perpendicular to the antenna substrate. Different techniques have been proposed for exciting patch antennas using such a feed structure. Previously, an aperture-coupled dielectric resonator antenna using a perpendicular feed substrate has been demonstrated to have very good power coupling efficiency. For a two-dimensional rectangular array with tapered slot antenna elements, a power combining network on a perpendicular substrate is generally required to couple power to or from the array. We describe two aperture-coupled feeding techniques for coupling microwave power from a linearly tapered slot antenna (LTSA) to a microstrip feed on a perpendicular substrate. In addition, we present measured results for return losses and radiation patterns.