Printed high gain beam steerable patch antenna using parasitic pixel elements

A planar parasitic pixel patch antenna with beamsteering capability for high gain applications is presented. The beam steering technique is provided by using an antenna structure consisting of an aperture coupled driven patch antenna with a rectangular grid of parasitic pixels surrounding the planar patch. The surrounding pixels can be connected/disconnected resulting in reconfigurability in beamdirection. The proposed antenna is able to steer the broadside beam to 30°, 0°, −30° in yz-plane (φ=90) and xz-plane (φ=0). With this design there is no need to use any phase shifters. The bandwidth of the proposed antenna is 400 MHz (7.2%) around the center frequency of 5.5 GHz with measured peak gains of 7.75–8 dBi. The proposed antenna has been fabricated using a printed circuit board and has been measured to validate the results obtained by the theoretical analyses, genetic optimizations and simulations.