Abstract
A method for designing electromagnetically coupled (EMC) printed dipole arrays is presented. The advantages of EMC dipoles are greater bandwidth, higher efficiency and an easier match to the feed lines, when compared to classically fed printed antennas. The excitation mechanism is provided by a strip transmission line embedded inside the substrate which couples energy parasitically to the microstrip antenna. Electromagnetically coupled microstrip dipoles have been investigated by empirical or approximate analysis techniques, and an approximate model has been derived for the microstrip dipoles. The method is based on the moment method solution of integral equation derived from approximate Green's function for a grounded dielecric slab. The element lengths, offsets and a stub length of an EMC dipole array are determined by the direct search optimization method of Hooke and Jeeves. To show the feasibility of the method proposed, the mathematical formulation and numerical results are presented for Chebyshev arrays.
