Design, Simulation and Fabrication of a Wideband Steerable Antenna Array using Rogers and Fed by 4x4 Butler Matrix

Abstract

The paper presents the design, simulation and fabrication of a wideband steerable antenna operating at 3GHz and using microstrip line technology.However, the standard Butler matrix has mainly the disadvantage of a limited bandwidth. This could be solved by using multilayer structures, but will raise the price of the product. Therefore, this paper focuses on the conception of a planar wideband Butler matrix fabricated on a low-loss substrate: Rogers 4003c. To this end, a three-branch line coupler is designed to replace the conventional hybrid coupler. It is then optimized by using loaded stubs T-model to reduce the size.In addition to that, U-shaped Schiffman phase shifters are introduced instead of the conventional phase shifters to obtain better performance in terms of bandwidth and resonance.The simulation results of the wideband steerable antenna array show a good performance. The fabrication of the overall structure is presented by the end of the paper.