Geodesic H-plane Horn Antennas

Description

This article describes a detailed procedure that allows for a time-efficient design of fully metallic geodesic H -plane horn antennas using an in-house ray-tracing method together with an optimization algorithm. With all the propagation in the air, geodesic H -plane horn antennas are low-loss and highly efficient. The proposed geodesic H -plane horn antennas provide a new degree of freedom, the height profile, to alleviate phase errors, realizing high gains and aperture efficiencies. Optimizations are implemented to design the height profile for a given target, enabled by the highly accurate and time-efficient in-house ray-tracing model. To demonstrate the correctness and versatility of the proposed design procedure, two prototypes are manufactured with computerized numerical control (CNC) machining and compared to their planar counterparts, with the aim of a high increased gain and aperture efficiency, respectively. The prototypes maintain good frequency stability from 26 to 33 GHz, with side lobe levels lower than -15 dB and return loss better than 15 dB. The first prototype improves the realized gain by over 5 dB compared to the reference horn, while the second prototype achieves an aperture efficiency of around 65% within the operating frequency band.

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