Electrically Steerable Phased-Arrays for 5G Sub-6 GHzMassive MIMO Active Antenna Units : Re-configurable Feed Networks

Sammanfattning: During this project we have designed a new type of antenna that uses an array of antenna elements in order to emit electromagnetic radiation as signals and to be able to control the beam. After an extended time the design yielded a simulation which had the correct characteristics. After printing and constructing a prototype of the antenna it was tested in an anechoic chamber at Uppsala University. The array was divided into two different sub-arrays: the upper and the lower sub-arrays. Each of these consisted in itself of two sides: the long and the short sides. Each side had seven radiating elements, during the tests only one of the two sub-arrays (upper or lower) was running. Both sub-arrays are excited via a rat-race or 90 degree coupler. While the antenna was running it had 14 radiating elements and two phase shifters, two per sub-array and two per side. The idea was for a signal to travel passing the radiating elements and the phase shifter which would steer the induced electromagnetic signal in one direction, a traveling-wave array. This direction could be changed since the phase shifters were configurable in three different states per phase shifter, hence the induced electromagnetic beam was steerable. The beam was also steerable through the feed which was re-configurable, since there were two feeds per sub-array a phase shift could be introduced between the long and the short side. The beam steering range was between -2 degrees and 11 degrees oriented as 0 degrees would be a perpendicular line from the array to the receiving end. The design itself worked which could be stated from the results in the upper part of the array, the test results from the lower part however did not match the simulated results. This is likely due to an error in the construction of the antenna rather than the theory since the upper and lower part of the array was mirrored versions of each other. The phase shifters worked as intended in the bigger picture but were slightly different in the simulations compared to the physical ones, likely due to the same type of error source as regarding the full antenna.