A Wideband and Wide Scanning Tightly Coupled Dipole Array with Meta-Surface Wide-Angle Impedance Matching

A low profile ultra-wideband tightly coupled dipole array is studied. The antenna elements are fed by Marchand baluns of small size and low cost. A meta-surface based wide-angle impedance matching (MS-WAIM) layer is introduced to replace the traditional dielectric WAIM, improving the beam scan performance and reducing the antenna profile. The simulation shows that the proposed antenna array can operate over 2.4-12.4 GHz, approximately 5:1 bandwidth with maximum scanning angle of 50 degrees for both E plane and 45 degrees for H plane. The antenna profile above the ground is only 0.578 lambda(H) at the highest operating frequency. This antenna array can find its application in the forthcoming massive MIMO beamforming systems for 5G.