A Beam-Steerable Circular Polarized Antenna Based on Risley Prism With Two Different Tilt Angles LPP-PSSs

There is a high demand for flexible beam scanning of antennas in modern communication and radar technologies. Compared to other beam scanning techniques, mechanical control techniques have the advantage of simple principles and easy implementation. Mechanical beam scanning technology based on the Risley Prism (RP) principle has become a research hotspot, and most of them are realized by rotating a pair of transmitarray for beam scanning. However, a single layer of transmitarray can only achieve beam steering range of ±90° in azimuth. Hence, this article proposed a circularly polarized (CP) antenna that utilizes two linear phase progression phase shifting surfaces (LPP-PSSs) with different tilt angles to achieve 2-D beam scanning coverage of 0-360° in azimuth. The proposed antenna can achieve a maximum scanning range of elevation angle from 4-42° and azimuth angle from 0-360° . Furthermore, when operating at the center frequency of 11 GHz, it has a gain of 18.02 dBi and a 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 36.37%. The proposed antenna has significant application prospects in scenarios that require beam scanning and anti-interference, such as tracking radar and satellite communications.