Performance Improvement in the Design of Broad-Beam Microstrip Reflectarray

This is a theoretical and experimental study of microstrip reflectarray useable in wireless local area networks (WLAN). The effectiveness of reducing the unit cell size of microstrip reflectarray which is duplicated the same radiating aperture as quadratic backscatter was investigated. A reflectarray with variable element sizes and reduced grid spacing have been designed at 10 GHz. For a given number of elements, it is shown that increased gain can be attainted for reduced unit cell size with no significant change in array size. To confirm the validity of this approach, an X-band antenna prototype was designed and developed. It was experimentally tested and showed good performance characteristics.