Aperture- and Spectrum-Sharing Reflectarray and 2D Leaky-Wave Array for Wide-Range Sensing and High-Throughput Communication

Lei, Peng and Chen, Pei and Yan, Zheng-Gang and Wang, Lei and Wei, Chang-Ning and Cai, Jin-Yang and Liao, Zhang-Qi and Lu, Wen-Zhong and Wang, Xiao-Chuan (2026) Aperture- and Spectrum-Sharing Reflectarray and 2D Leaky-Wave Array for Wide-Range Sensing and High-Throughput Communication. IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. pp. 1-5. ISSN 1536-1225

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Abstract

A novel shared-aperture antenna (SAA) integrating a fixed-beam reflectarray (RA) and a rapid-scanning leaky-wave antenna (LWA) is proposed. The proposed SAA element consists of two off-centered patches with embedded L -shaped slots for the RA on the top layer and a dual-slot radiator for the LWA on the bottom layer. By introducing a slow-wave (SW) structure in the substrate-integrated waveguide, the −1st spatial-harmonic radiation band of the LWA is adjusted to enable co-frequency operation with the RA. In addition, the enhanced dispersion introduced by the SW structure improves the beam-scanning capability, resulting in a 43% enhancement in scanning range with a scanning rate of 35.8∘ /GHz. Measurements show that RA achieves a 22.7 dBi peak gain at 14.4GHz, with 1-dB gain bandwidth of 20.5% (12.2–15.0GHz) and 3-dB gain bandwidth exceeding 40% over 10 to 15GHz. The LWA scans from −69∘ to +67∘ across 10.7 to 14.5GHz with a peak gain of 24.4 dBi. Moreover, the measured RA–LWA isolation remains below −33 dB, and sidelobe levels remain below −10 dB across the operating band.