Wideband beam steering from backfire to end-fire miniaturized leaky wave antenna with PAM-shaped SSPP structure

This work presents a miniaturized leaky wave antenna (LWA) featuring a symmetric pulse amplitude modulation (PAM)-shaped spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPP) structure integrated into a transmission line (TL). The metal patch employed in PAM structures is symmetrical, with the same width, height, and duration on both sides of the TL. The PAM-modulated structure-based TL is made up of 27 unit cells, with 14 arranged in a positive cycle and 13 arranged in a negative cycle. The proposed antenna has a miniaturized structurewith dimensions of 58 mm × 6 mm × 0.51 mm. It achieves wide range of frequencies scanning. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed design electronically steers from −87° (backward scanning) to +180 ° (forward scanning) over a bandwidth of 0 to 19.5 GHz with a scanning angle of 267 °. It delivers 11.8 dBi of maximum gain and a scanning rate of 1.335° GHz −1 .