Side lobe level suppression for L-band array antenna using binomial power distribution

The development of L-band array antenna with side lobe level (SLL) suppression is presented using binomial power distribution. The antenna which is fed using proximity coupling technique is intended to work at 1.27GHz for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) application. The array antenna is designed on 2 layers of FR4 epoxy dielectric substrates in which the thickness of each dielectric substrate is 0.8mm. It consists of five microstrip patches deployed on the top side of first layer of dielectric substrate. To show the potentiality in SLL suppression, an L-band array antenna with uniform power distribution is also characterized. From the result, it shows that the SLL of proposed array antenna is around 29dB at the frequency of 1.27GHz in which this is 14dB down from the SLL of array antenna with uniform power distribution. It proves that the array antenna designed by using binomial power distribution with Pascal coefficient is more effective for SAR application compared to the uniform power distribution.