S-Band Spline-Shaped Aperture-Stacked Patch Antenna for Air Traffic Control Applications

The design of the radiating elements of a S-band planar array for air traffic control (ATC) applications is addressed. Towards this end, a novel aperture-stacked patch (ASP) is proposed that, unlike state-of-the-art layouts, exploits a spline shape on the top layer of the ASP to give the designer more degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) to fit user-defined requirements over the whole operative bandwidth. The elementary radiator is synthesized by optimizing the key-indicators of the radiation performance of the final planar arrangement instead of, as generally done, the single-element features. The analysis of both the single element and the array outcomes is carried out by means of full-wave simulations to assess the effectiveness of the proposed design as well as the matching with the design constraints.