antenna-theory.com

[shwetavincent]

Dear admin,

I am a research student and I want to design a novell antenna for synthetic aperture radar. I have been reading many IEEE transaction papers on antenna design and each paper proposes different techniques to design and fabricate antennas.
Could you please tell me what are the common parameters that I should consider to start with while designing an antenna.
Also, is designing an antenna the same as designing an antenna array?

Looking forward to hear from you.

[bigSteve]

Doesn't sound like your research work is going to be very good. Here are the issues you will have:

(1) You don't know how to design an antenna at all, as you don't know what should be optimized and why. Hence, whatever you design, you won't know if it is good, novel, bad, or a copy.

(2) Not only do you not know antennas, but you then want to design an antenna for a specific application - again this is harder and you can't do this without knowing (1) well.

Nevertheless, here are your pointers:
(1) An antenna array is a set of antennas specially separated. You need to make sure they have high isolation (low coupling between the antennas)
(2) SAR is not an array. It is one antenna that moves with the plane and saves the signals as it moves, thus making a "synthetic aperture". Then you have to find out what properties of antennas would improve over current synthetic aperture design. If you don't know the problems, then you can't start a design.

[shwetavincent]

Dear Admin,

Thank you for your kind guidance. I began reading in detail about antenna theory and the construction.
There's a problem that I have come across.
A ground based -SAR (GB-SAR) system termed LISA, is currently in use for landslide monitoring in Italy. This system consists of a radar moving from left to right on a rail to monitor a range of hills and detect the occurrence of landslides. (http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/downloads/jrc_tp2702_lisa_en.pdf)

A novel design of a MIMO system, instead of LISA has been proposed. Now this MIMO design, makes use of 12 horns for transmitting and 12 vivaldi antennas for reception. All the 12 horns and vivaldis are placed in sequence which are used for monitoring a test field.

The transmitters work at 11-18 GHz with 13 dB gain, and the receivers work at 9-25 GHz.

I believe this system is quite big and can be minimized with careful alternate antenna design.

Questions:
1. For landslide monitoring why has the author of this alternate MIMO system only chosen horns and vivaldi antennas?
2. Should the directivity of the horn and vivaldi be considered as the final parameters for design in this case? If any other parameters need to be considered what are they?

Thanks in advance.