Abstract
Future communications will provide higher transmission rates and higher operating frequencies. In addition, agile beam tracking will be an inevitable trend in technology development. The terahertz retrodirective antenna array proposed and discussed in this paper can be a better solution for agile beam tracking. The array receives a 40-GHz navigation signal and accurately retransmits a 120-GHz beam in the direction of the arrival wave. Simulation results indicate that the proposed array with a stacked sandwich structure has realized the tracking of the received wave. The scanning radiation pattern shows that the array gain is 23.87 dB at 19.9° when the incident angle is 20° with a relative error of only 0.5%, meaning that there is a lateral error of only 8.7 m at a transmission distance of 5 km.
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Zhong-bo ZHU designed the research and drafted the manuscript. Xiao-jun LI helped on communication antenna request greatly, Wei-dong HU helped optimize the simulation model, Leo P. LIGTHART gave a lot of theoretical guidance, and Xian-qi LIN helped optimize the antenna circuit. Tao QIN, Jiang-jie ZENG, and Sheng LI processed the data. Xian-qi LIN and Wei-dong HU helped organize the manuscript. Zhong-bo ZHU and Wei-dong HU revised and finalized the manuscript.
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Zhong-bo ZHU, Wei-dong HU, Tao QIN, Sheng LI, Xiao-jun LI, Jiang-jie ZENG, Xian-qi LIN, and Leo P. LIGTHART declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Project supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFB1801505), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61527805 and 61731001)
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Zhu, Zb., Hu, Wd., Qin, T. et al. A high-precision terahertz retrodirective antenna array with navigation signal at a different frequency. Front Inform Technol Electron Eng 21, 377–383 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.1900581
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.1900581