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Self-adapting phased array antennas are designed to adapt to surfaces that change shape in time. This interesting feature allows to increase coverage of modern wireless devices, but on the other hand it raises the issue of maintaining the radiation pattern undistorted when the array changes its shape. Moreover nowadays many applications of phased arrays require beam steering capabilities, that is closely related to the possibility of tilting the main beam towards a desired direction (or away from an undesired one). In this work a 4 × 4 phased array antenna placed on a doubly wedge-deformed surface is considered: a simplified version of the projection method is adopted to recover its pattern when the main beam is tilted in multiple directions, thus leading to a simpler but still effective method.

Gaseous plasma antennas are devices that exploit partially or fully ionized gas to transmit and receive electro-magnetic waves, in contrast with conventional antennas that are only made by metal and dielectric materials. Since plasma discharge parameters, e.g. plasma density, can be tuned, plasma antenna properties can be changed dynamically; this constitutes a promising alternative to conventional metallic antennas for applications in which reconfigurability is desired. In this work, we report on the first steps toward the realization, and the characterization in terms of radiation pattern, and magnitude of the reflection coefficient of an early prototype of a gaseous plasma antenna in the UHF frequency range. Numerical investigations have supported the design of the setup, and helped in the evaluation of the the role of plasma density profiles in affecting the antenna properties.

Pattern recovering of conformai phased array on changing surfaces is receiving an increasing attention in the last years. This paper presents the pattern recovery of a strongly deformed conformal phased-array using the projection method. A 4 × 4 flat array is placed on a doubly curved surface. The phase compensation technique is applied first on rows, and then, considering rows as single antenna elements, on array columns. This technique demonstrates to be effective in recovering direction and width at half maximum of the pattern main lobe and in suppressing side lobes. Analytically predicted recovered patterns are confirmed through full-wave numerical simulations.