2017 XI International Conference on Antenna Theory and Techniques (ICATT), Kyiv, Ukraine pp.

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Radome Integrated Slotted Waveguide Antennas

S. S. Sekretarov and D. M. Vavriv

Microwave Electronics Department
Institute of Radio Astronomy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Kharkov, Ukraine
sekretarov@rian.kharkov.ua

Abstract—The development of slotted waveguide antennas
with an integrated radome is discussed. The integrated radome
is intended to improve the resistance of slotted-waveguide
antennas against complex environmental conditions and to
extend application areas of the antennas. Efficient approaches to
the design, simulation, and fabrication of such antennas are
considered. The development of a single plane monopulse Ku-
band circular array is presented as an example of the
implementations of such approaches. The antenna test results are
presented to verify the design, simulation, and manufacturing
solutions proposed
Keywords— slotted waveguide antennas; antenna radomes;
antenna production technologies
I. INTRODUCTION
Slotted waveguide antennas (SWA) are very popular in
various remote sensing applications and communication
systems. Their advantages are high efficiency, compact size,
polarization purity, and the possibility to realize a desired
radiation pattern [1, 2]. However, the conventional design of
such antennas with open slots in a hollow waveguide is not
practical for some applications. Dust, moisture, and even
regular handling procedures may result in degradation of the
antenna operation functionalities. Typically, this problem is
solved by installing the antenna under an external radome, e.g.
multilayer sandwich structure. But, being developed as a
separate part of the antenna system, the radome may cause
some degradation of the antenna performance in both the
radiation pattern and input reflection characteristics.
Conventional approaches to the development of such external
radomes show that in order to decrease the effect of the radome
on the antenna performance, the radome should be displaced
from the radiating slots at least at /2, where  is the operating
wavelength. This results in increasing of the overall thickness
of the antenna what is not acceptable for some applications.
In this presentation, we describe another approach to the
antenna environmental protection, which does not require the
usage of an external radome. Such protection can be organized,
by producing the radiating slots in the foil of a foiled dielectric
material, which services as a waveguide wall. For example,
standard foiled dielectric material of Rogers RT/Duroid series
is a good candidate for such wall. It is important that in this
case, the slots can be etched by using standard circuit-board
production technology. Increase of the production rate and
reduction of the production costs are obvious benefits of using
such technology, as compare to the standard milling process
used for the production of slots in a metallic wall of the
waveguide.
In order to design the above antennas with integrated
radome, an original iterative simulation algorithm [3] has been
generalized to simulate and optimized such type of antennas.
Essential details of the proposed design approach are described
in Section II.
The technology of the assembly of the discussed antennas
has also certain peculiarities. For example, the dip-soldering
process commonly used in the production of slotted-waveguide
antennas is not applicable for this case. The conductive epoxy
gluing technology can be used instead of the above process.
This technology provides reproducible results and can be
automated with standard equipment. Critical features of the
manufacturing technology are considered in Section III.
In Section IV, an example of the development of an
antenna with an integrated radome is presented. This is a Ku-
band monopulse antenna, which radomeless version was
described in [4]. The new antenna shows characterizes similar
to that in [4], what is demonstrated by the corresponding
measurement results.
II. DESIGN AND SIMULATION METHOD
The design approach to a SWA containing a dielectric layer
should take into account coupling between slots via this layer.
To cope with this problem, numerical and half-analytical
approaches have been proposed in the literature. A modified
Elliot design procedure [5-10] is commonly used to model such
antennas and to estimate slot parameters. According to this
procedure, an equivalent circuit of the array is introduced,
where the conductance of individual radiating slots and the
external mutual coupling between the slots are calculated by
taking into account the introduced dielectric layer [7]. Though
such design approach is not time consuming and provides a
reasonable accuracy, there are some disadvantages to be
mentioned. In order to take into account most of the essential
SWA features, the corresponding equivalent circuit becomes
very complex and sophisticated [1, 2, 11]. For example, it is
rather complicated to accurately account for the array
configuration, the slots shape, effects of coupling of the
radiating and feeding slots, and surface loses.
We use the original iterative design algorithm [3] for the
SWAs development, which is based on a full-wave simulation.
This approach is time consuming, but it does not have the

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 Radome Integrated Slotted Waveguide Antennas
above described limitations and can be applied to a wide range
of possible array configurations with accounting nonstandard
elements. The results provided by the used approach are rather
accurate what follows from the comparison of the measured
and simulated characteristics for a number of the so far
developed antennas [12].
The approach used for the antenna simulation and design is
described in details in [3]. This approach includes the
following main steps. An initial approximation for the slots
offsets and their lengths is generated by using some simple
assumption or a design method. If no such assumption is
available, the slots can be equally offset from the waveguides
centerlines, and their lengths can be also equal. In this case,
more iterations will be needed for the algorithm convergence.
The antenna is simulated by a full-wave simulator, and the
radiating slots field amplitudes and the phases are extracted
from the simulation results. The obtained field amplitudes and
phases are compared with that needed to realize a required
aperture distribution. It is important that this aperture
distribution is normalized on the simulated input power and the
desired antenna efficiency. The difference between the required
and simulated aperture distributions gives a relative error of the
field amplitude and phase for each slot. The estimated errors
are used for the correction of each slot offset and each slot
length to adjust the radiating field amplitude and phase,
respectively. It is assumed that the amplitude and the phase of
the longitudinal slots can be adjusted independently. So, the all
slots can be corrected simultaneously. Then, the algorithm
iterates until the error is below some prescribed level. Usually,
few iterations are needed to achieve an acceptable accuracy.
The presence of the dielectric layer changes the radiation
properties of the slots. The resonant length and optimal width
are decreased as compared to the dielectric free surface. It is
interesting that the dependence of the isolated slot radiation
coefficient versus the normalized offset is practically the same
for the regular waveguide and the dielectric covered
waveguide, as it is illustrated in Fig.1. The radiation
coefficients are calculated here for the resonant slot length. The
waveguide dimensions are the same. The plots demonstrate
that radiation coefficient increase equally for the both types of
radiating elements, thus the dielectric layer does not change the
antenna performance.
The dependence of the resonant slot length versus the offset
is also shown in Fig.1 for both the hollow waveguide and the
dielectric covered waveguide. As it is expected, the resonant
length is decreased proportionally to the dielectric wavelength
reduction.
By using the described procedure, we have redesigned the
previously developed Ku-band antenna [4] to enhance its
exploitation characteristics. The antenna diameter is 265 mm.
We utilized the -25dB Taylor n-bar amplitude distribution for
circular apertures and inclined in E-plane phase distribution in
order to obtain the desired radiation pattern.
The antenna has a two-layer design. Upper, the radiating
layer, consists of two mirrored halves in the H-plane having 18
resonant waveguides with longitudinal slots each. The total
number of the radiating slots is 244. The slots are covered by
dielectric plate.
2017 XI International Conference on Antenna Theory and Techniques (ICATT), Kyiv, Ukraine
Fig. 1. Radiation coefficient and resonant length of longitudinal slot
versus the normalized offset for both the regular waveguide and the dielectric-
covered waveguide
The second layer contains the feeding structure. The
feeding of each half is provided by a pair of nonresonant
waveguides via inclined coupling slots. An interlaced feeding
scheme is used for each half: the first line feeds the even
radiating waveguides and the second feeds the odd ones.
Nonresonant feeding structure provides the antenna beam
inclination in the E-plane. The inclination of the antenna beam
significantly reduces RCS of the antenna in the direction of a
target.
The four antenna feeding structure inputs are combined by
a single-plane monopulse comparator. It combines pairs of
feeding lines from each antenna half with predefined
amplitudes and phases and then combines the halves for Sum
and Delta outputs. The comparator is based on a folded
magic-T unit. The all antenna waveguide layers are made of
reduced height waveguides with the height 3.5 mm only, what
minimizes the antenna thickness and weight.
A calibration port has been introduced what is needed to
provide a permanent control of the identity of the Sum and
Delta outputs of the antenna.
The synthesis of the radiating slots distribution has been
performed according to the described above procedure by
simulating the complete antenna structure including the
dielectric layer. Thus it takes into account the all features of the
antenna design.
III. ANTENNA FABRICATION
The waveguide part of the designed SWA has been
fabricated from an aluminum alloy by CNC milling process.
The archived fabrication accuracy is 0.02mm. In order to
provide the protection of the aluminum parts against the
corrosion, to increase the conductance, and to reduce also the
ohmic losses, the aluminum parts have been silver plated.
Duroid RT5880 material has been selected for the
production of the top cover of the antenna with the radiating
slots. The dielectric constant of this material is 2.20, and
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 S. S. Sekretarov, D. M. Vavriv

TABLE I. MEASURED ANTENNA SCECIFICATIONS

Parameter Value

Frequency bandwidth 0.5GHz in Ku-band

Beam type Pencil, inclined in E-plane

Beam inclination in E-plane 15°

Polarization Linear/Vertical

Sum pattern 3dB beam-width 5°

Sum pattern maximum level of
<-20dB
sidelobes
Delta pattern null depth <-40dB

Monopulse constant 1.3

VSWR <1.15

Sum-Delta ports isolation >40dB

Diameter 265mm

Thickness 9.6mm
Fig. 2. RT/Duroid panel with etched slots
Weight 900g

Radome Integrated

Total antenna thickness is only 9.6mm without the

comparator and 15mm with the comparator.
The silver filled epoxy E4110 from EPO-TEK has been
utilized to bond the consisting parts of the antenna. A glue joint
device has been specially designed in order to ensure the
accurate thickness of the antenna layers. The obtained
conductance of the glue jointly with the silvered aluminum
results in a low ohmic losses inside the antenna, below 0.5 dB.
The antenna outputs, which are Sum, Delta and calibration
ports, are equipped with compact waveguide-to-coaxial
adapters. Due to this, the antenna is completely protected from
the environment. The developed design is also convenient for
the antenna pressurization to increase power handling
performance.

IV. MEASUREMENTS RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

Fig. 3. Antenna appearence
dissipation factor tan  equals 0.0009. It also has low rate of
moisture absorption of 0.02%, what is an essential advantage
for outdoor usage. A successful usage of RT5880 material was
also reported in [11] for a Ka-band antenna.
The thickness of the dielectric is 0.508mm, and the copper
cladding thickness is 9µm. The slots have been etched in the
foil from one side of the material, as shown in Fig.2, with the
accuracy of 0.01mm. The foil from the opposite side has been
etched completely.
The radiation parameters of the produced SWA have been
measured in the far-field zone. Fig. 4 shows a comparison of
the simulated and measured Sum pattern in the E-plane. Fig. 5
shows a comparison of the simulated and measured Sum and
Delta radiation patterns in H-plane. High reproducibility of the
measured results along with a good compliance with the
simulation results is demonstrated.
The antenna radiates a 5° pencil-like Sum pattern beam,
which is significantly inclined with respect to the antenna
surface normal in the E-plane. Delta pattern is correspondingly
inclined in E-plane. The measured gain is above 30dBi. The
difference of the achieved gain from the theoretical value is
less than 0.5dB, what proves a low level of losses in the
antenna. The sidelobes suppression is below -20dB. The
measured VSWR is close to the simulated one and it is below
1.15:1 for the both Sum and Delta inputs. The antenna

66 2017 XI International Conference on Antenna Theory and Techniques (ICATT), Kyiv, Ukraine
 Radome Integrated Slotted Waveguide Antennas
Fig. 4. Simulation and measured radiation patternin E-plane
Fig. 5. Simulation and measured radiation pattern in H-plane
characteristics are stable within a 3% frequency band with
respect to the central frequency. Complete list of achieved
antenna specification is presented in Table I.
V. CONCLUSIONS
Development of radome integrated slotted waveguide
antennas have been considered in the paper. An efficient
2017 XI International Conference on Antenna Theory and Techniques (ICATT), Kyiv, Ukraine
approach to the design of such antenna has been proposed. The
realized algorithm allows performing the synthesis of complex
SWA configurations which contain up to several thousands of
radiating slots.
The achieved results have been demonstrated on an
example of the development of Ku-band monopulse SWA
useful for tracking radar application. The antenna has been
designed, fabricated and tested. The observed compliance of
the simulated and the measured antenna parameters validates
the design, the simulation, and the manufacturing approaches.
The antenna also shows good reproducibility of its parameters
during the batch production.
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Microwave Electronics Department of IRA NASU, www.radar.kharov.com.
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