An UHF to L band dual‐polarized wide‐angle scanning tapered slot phased array with tightly coupled structure.

This article presents a novel dual‐polarized tightly coupled tapered slot antenna (TC‐TLA) array. With increased capacitive coupling effects of U‐shaped metallic channels of adjacent flare‐arms of TLA elements, the operational bandwidth for broadside scan increases from 4.4:1 to 5.7:1, and the bandwidth at a 50° scan increases from 3.1:1 to 5.7:1, compared with the conventional TLA array. The proposed TC‐TLA array delivers over 0.35–2 GHz bandwidth, ±50° scanning coverage in the horizontal plane with an active VSWR < 3.5, and <−20 dB cross‐polarization. Prototype for a 4 × 22 dual‐polarized TC‐TLA array fed by 1 to 4 wide‐band power dividers is fabricated and measured. Good agreement is achieved between numerical and measured results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]