Abstract
DirectionaI antenna arrays with excessive side lobe levels waste considerable amount of energy and may also cause interference to other equipment. Therefore, it is desirable to reduce side lobe level. In this work, Taylor aperture distribution based feed network has been designed for a 1x48 linear array to suppress the side lobe levels up to 31 dBs. Our high-gain linear antenna array comprises of 48 anti-podal Vivaldi antenna elements fed through a strip-line based corporate feed network on a FR4 substrate, for S-band radar applications. The proposed feed network comprises of two sub arrays consisting of 24 elements each. These two sub arrays are mirror image to each other such that the inner most antenna elements receive maximum amplitude and the outermost antenna elements would receive minimum amplitudes. The first side-lobe level reduction, achieved using our proposed feed network is 18 dB lower than the conventional uniformly distributed feed networks.