A dual-beam leaky-wave antenna based on squarely modulated reactance surface

In this paper, a novel dual-beam leaky-wave antenna (LWA) based on squarely modulated reactance surface (SquMRS) is proposed. The equivalent transmission lines model is utilized to characterize the field distributions of surface wave guided by the SquMRS. The calculated dispersion characteristics of SquMRS are verified by the simulated results, and it is demonstrated that SquMRS exhibits a more flexible control of phase constant and attenuation constant compared with traditional sinusoidally modulated reactance surface (SinMRS), which means SquMRS has a great potential for near-field focusing and far-field beam shaping. On this basis, a versatile method, based on a superposition of individual modulation patterns, was used to generated two beams with almost identical gain at 8.5 GHz. The measured results show that the gains are 10 dBi and 8.2 dBi at θ₁ =-30° and θ₂ = 18°, respectively, and the radiation efficiency is 83%, which shows good agreement with the simulated results.