Multi-Band Air Defense/Air Search Radar

Multi-band phased array radar systems that contain solid-state transmitter sources and low-noise preamplifiers for transmission and reception are preferred over the conventional airborne radar antennas. The active array radar offers the advantages in theareas of power management and efficiency, reliability, signal reception, beam steering target detection and system performance. The current phased array radar design is narrow-band, very complex, expensive and less efficient. In addition, the size, powerdissipation and the weight problems have inhibited the development of multi-band phased array antenna systems so far. This proposal describes the development of multi-band active radar system based on wide-band multi-functional antenna elements and verylow loss, wide-band, and high power handling phase control circuits for beam scan. The new phase shifter design is based on micro-strip feed lines perturbed by the proximity of voltage controlled piezoelectric transducer (PET). The insertion loss of phaseshifter is less than 1dB up to 20 GHz. The new active array radar design will have significant improvement in performance, size and efficiency.