1-Bit Wide-Angle Folded Reflectarray Antenna at Ka-Band.

This letter presents a folded reflectarray (FRA) capable of electrical beam steering in the Ka-band. The FRA consists of a low-profile feeding source, a dual-layer wire grid, and 36×36 polarization twisting reflective elements. An element of center shorted patch with two plated through holes is proposed where only two switches are required for polarization twisting and 1-bit encoding. A cavity is then introduced surrounding the element to improve the beam-steering performance. To verify the proposed element, two prototypes with 0° and 60° beam directions are designed and experimented where the metal stub and open circuit are used to model “on/off” states of PIN diodes for simplification. The measured peak gain of 0°FRA is 27.5 dBi with 2 dB gain bandwidth of 28–32 GHz (13.3%). A measured gain drop of 3.25 dB is achieved by the 60°FRA, which verifies the wide-angle beam-steering ability. The measured reflection coefficient of the feeding source is less than −15 dB over the operating band. The proposed FRA has a good potential to realize beam-steering with real PIN diodes for the satellite communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]