Microstrip Array Antenna Design for a Radiometric Ground-Based Fire Detection Application

In this paper, a first investigation on critical issues for a fire-detection ground-based Ku-band radiometer design is addressed. A printed technology with standard dielectrics has been employed, in order to reach low cost, simplicity in realization and easy integrability with the electronic front-end. The antenna has been designed as an arrays of patches, where number of elements, spacings and feeding currents have been optimized to fulfill requirements of low side lobe level and good crosspolarization.For the radio frequency front-end, the receiver architecture is a direct-conversion topology, because it is well suited to be monolithically integrated in a single chip.