In this work, a new reconfigurable discrete 1D beam-steering Fabry–Perot cavity antenna with enhanced radiation performance is presented. It consists of a probe-fed patch antenna printed on the ground plane and a reconfigurable metasurface acting as the upper partially reflective surface to realize beam steering. By utilizing 6 × 6 proposed reconfigurable unit cells on the superstrate, the beam-steering angle can be effectively enhanced from ±7° to ±17° with fewer active elements and a much simpler biasing network. The proposed antenna was fabricated to validate the feasibility. Good agreement between the simulated and measured results is achieved. Moreover, the measured realized gains are over 11 dBi with a gain variation from the boresight direction to the tilted direction <0.2 dBi.

A new design of reconfigurable sub-nanosecond pulse generator (PG) with pulse shape selection ability is presented in this paper. Step recovery diode is used as the pulse sharpening device and the pulse shaping circuit consists of a controllable RC differentiator in which a single PIN diode is embedded, which provides two different switchable pulse shaping performances. The realized PG has a compact (10 × 12 mm2) simple structure and is easy to implement while generating Gaussian and monocycle pulses with 510 and 660 ps pulse width, respectively. The proposed pulse shaping method is versatile and can be effectively modified and reconfigured to generate more complicated pulse shapes such as polycycle signals. The measured results reveal that the proposed reconfigurable PG is suitable to be used in systems with pulse shape modulation that require sub-nanosecond pulses at low pulse repetition rates.