S. V. Ballandovich, G. A. Kostikov, A. A. Ptashkin, M. I. Sugak

This paper presents results of the designing and of experimental research on a printed lens multilayered antennas array. In order to successfully transform a spherical wave of the feed into the flat one, individual geometry of each element must be selected in a peculiar way. For this a preliminary step must to be taken. The step implies designing a phase response of the propagated field on the typical sizes of printed elements. Previous publications fail to address the practical issue of the correlation between the number of layers, geometry of the elements and potentially achievable characteristics of arrays. The paper presented aims at filling this gap. The analysis of printed elements characteristics was carried out in an idealized waveguide with two electric and two magnetic walls. Printed elements of four simple forms ensuring bilinear polarization were investigated: the square, the round, the crosswise and the crosswise with the capacitor loadings on the end. For the form of each element complex coefficients of S-matrix were calculated. The high-quality radiation pattern is achieved through defining the necessary number of layers using results of the calculation. An approximated formula was implied to compute both experimental and theoretical radiation patterns for the three-layer printed arrays. Set of the curves given in the results allows one to draw the optimum interlayer distance.