• Composites Research
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.25-30
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• 2007

This paper describes the basic design and fabrication of smart skin antenna for phased array applications. The smart skin phased array antenna, of which radiation pattern can be electrically steerable without mechanical rotation, has to meet the both mechanical and electrical performance. The smart skin antenna is a honeycomb sandwich structure to enhance the mechanical performance such as strength, weight and so on. The example of smart skin antenna integrated with radome is designed with the resonant frequency of 5 GHz, circular polarization, 2 by 2 subarray, and a coaxial probe-fed excitation. In addition, the performance of raw microstrip patch antenna uncovered radome is investigate. The fabricated smart skin antenna shows a reasonable performance with gain of 12.2 dBi and frequency bandwidth of 6.4 %.