A Novel Steering Antenna for Missile Guidance

The RF missile seeker offers all-weather target acquisition capability along with instantaneous target velocity measurements. These features would greatly enhance missile targeting ability. A key component of the future RF seeker is a steering antenna which is required to be very light -weight and low in cost. Currently used gimbal mounted antennas are slow and bulky, while phased arrays remain prohibitively expensive and complex for this application. To solve the problem, Waveband Corporation proposes to develop and demonstate a new type of steering antenna that has no discrete phase shifting elements and offers a compact planar design. It uses a property of semiconductor material to affect the propagation of millimeter waves(MMWs) when an electron-hole plasma is generated inside it. By changing rapidly the plasma spatial pattern, the beam steering functionality can be attained. The antenna design provides flezibility to accommodate different frequency band requirments as well as room limitation characteristics of the missile environment. The proposed work has its foundation in Waveband's patented technology and its recent proof-of-principle theoretical and experimental work. It will be focused on the design and fabrication of the prototype of the specifically selected fuze sensor antenna.