AMI Research and Development, LLC (AMI), and our small business commercialization partner Mercury Systems, Inc., propose a novel Passive Electronically Scanned Array (PESA) antenna to bridge the gap between high cost-high performance and low cost-medium performance antenna systems to meet the need for high volume phased array antennas for X-Band Satcom-On-The-Move (SOTM) Blue Force Tracking (BFT) applications. This array is referred to as the Dielectric Traveling Wave Array (DTWA). It meets the requirements of the SBIR solicitation A16-032 as in Table 1, and is only 8.0 in. x 8.0 in. x 6.0 in., as shown in Figure 1. The technology enabling the AMI solution is covered by U.S. Patent No. 9,246,230 and U.S. patent applications 13/372,122, 14/702,147, and EP patent application 12 744 769.6, PCT/US2015/028849. A further description of this technology, scaled to Ka-Band, was presented at the 2014 Antenna Applications Symposium at Allerton. The beamforming circuitry of the array consists of parallel dielectric filled waveguides with array elements coupled to the waveguide surfaces. To scan the beam along the waveguide axis, the propagation constant of the waveguides is changed using a reconfigurable layered structure in the waveguide.
