Design of a Wideband Coupled Feed Dipole Antenna for PCL Array Systems

This article proposes the design of a wideband coupled feed dipole antenna for Passive Coherent Location (PCL) systems. The proposed antenna consists of an internal direct feed dipole and an external coupled feed dipole. This coupled feed mechanism, which is often used in microstrip patch antennas, is applied to the dipole element for a wide matching bandwidth. To verify the operating principle of the proposed antenna, an equivalent circuit model is investigated along with some parametric studies of the coupling effect. The proposed antenna is then extended to an eight-element uniform circular array to confirm the beamforming performance for PCL systems. The results demonstrate that the coupled feed dipole element is more suitable to enhance the matching bandwidth compared to a conventional dipole antenna.