PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF CONICAL HORN ANTENNA BY USING WIRE MEDIUM STRUCTURE AND DIELECTRIC LOAD
Keywords:
Wire Medium, conical Horn Antenna, artificial materialAbstract
This paper proposes a technique for gain improvement of a conventional conical horn antenna for the X-band frequency by adjusting the principal planes of the radiation pattern to be symmetrical with a dielectric load and using a wire medium structure as a metamaterial applied on the aperture of the horn to enhance the directive gain without changing the antenna’s dimensions. The main idea of this research is for the applications of the dielectric load, which is located inside the horn to improve the patterns before transferring the electromagnetic waves through the wire medium structure, to enhance the directivity and reduce the side lobe level so that the total gain is obtained. The results show that the dielectric load and wire medium structure can increase the gain of a conventional conical horn antenna by approximately 20.4 dBi at 10 GHz of the operating frequency. In order to validate the simulated results, a prototype antenna was fabricated. The fundamental parameters such as the reflection coefficients (S11), radiation patterns, and directive gain were measured and compared to the calculation results. Finally, we found that the simulation results show good agreement with the experimental results.
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