A Beam-steerable Slotted Waveguide Antenna with Tunable Impedance Walls

In this paper we describe the design and development of a novel beam-steerable slotted waveguide antenna which simplifies the process of phase-shifting between consecutive array elements by using impedance walls on the two sides of a waveguide. The leaky-wave antenna is capable of steering the beam from 17 degrees to 73 degrees by changing the voltage from 11 Volts to 2.8 Volts. The voltage changes the capacitance of varactors located on the two side-impedance walls from 0.2 pF to 0.5 pF. The waveguide slotted antenna is 420 mm long and has 36 loaded H-shaped slots. The antenna operates at 9.2 GHz. It has a maximum gain of 15.5 dB and its half-power beamwidth is 4 degrees.