The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 25, 1989
Filed:
Dec. 04, 1985
Edward C DuFort, Fullerton, CA (US);
Hughes Aircraft Company, Los Angeles, CA (US);
Abstract
An optical limited scan antenna system is disclosed. The invention is a dual lens type array antenna system with a small array feed network. The system includes a bootlace-type microwave aperture lens with an array of radiating elements arranged along the linear aperture and an array of pickup elements arranged along the curved inner surface, an intermediate optical corrective lens, a feed array for illuminating the corrective lens with a source distribution, and with a power divider and phase shifters arranged to drive the feed array. The corrective lens is circularly symmetric (spherically symmetric in the three-dimensional case), and its radially varying dielectric constant is such that a point source on its surface is focused to an image point on the inner surface. The pickup elements on the curved surface of the aperture lens are coupled to corresponding radiating elements on the linear aperture. The corrective and aperture lens cooperate to map an input or source distribution into an aperture distribution which is a scaled version of the source distribution. The system results in high efficiency obtained with a minimum number of active elements and relatively low cost optical components.