Electronic Control Board for Phased Antenna Array Research and Prototyping

Current state-of-the-art phased antenna arrays used in modern generations of mobile networks and radars in terrestrial applications or as spacecraft antennas in space applications tend to be very complex and expensive devices with many mutually coupled elements and many input/output ports that are excited with varying amplitude and phase. Also, the simulation and design of such complex antenna arrays may not be accurate due to many sources of uncertainty, such as inhomogeneity of high-frequency substrate properties over large area, manufacturing tolerances, idealized component models, etc. Therefore, simpler solutions of these antenna arrays in the form of sparse arrays, non-uniform arrays or arrays with parasitic elements are intensively studied. In this paper, we present an experimental electronic control board, which is used in our research of simplified phased array antennas. This digitally controllable board, in addition to the commonly used changes in the amplitude and phase of the propagated signal, can connect the individual antenna elements to a programmable impedance load, variable in the capacitive and inductive range. The aim of the implementation of this control electronic board is to study the influence of the mutual couplings of actively excited elements of the antenna array and parasitic elements loaded by variable impedance load on the resulting properties of the antenna arrays.