Wide band shaped beam array of U-slot patches for high resolution SAR and satellite communications

This paper presents the design of practical antenna arrays with beam shaping controllability and beam steering capability for land imaging synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems and satellite communications. The U-shaped slot patch antenna with optimal design parameters is suggested as a single element for the proposed antenna arrays. The proposed antenna exhibits a wide bandwidth enough for the target applications. It is shown that the mutual coupling between such elements in both E-plane and H-plane arranged arrays is naturally weak. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is customized and applied to optimize the elements feeding (both amplitude and phase) to get multiple radiation patterns including flat-topped (fan-shaped), cosecant-squared and Isoflux beams. The results obtained in the present work are compared with other published results showing superior performance.