Geodesic H-Plane Horn Antennas

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 of 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 33GHz, with sidelobe levels lower than -15dB and return loss better than 15dB. The first prototype improves the realized gain by over 5dB compared to the reference horn, while the second prototype achieves an aperture efficiency of around 65% within the operating frequency band.

Automated summary

This article presents a time-efficient method for designing fully metallic geodesic H-plane horn antennas using ray-tracing and optimization. The proposed antennas utilize the height profile to mitigate phase errors and achieve high gains and aperture efficiencies. Two prototypes are fabricated and compared to planar counterparts, showing improved performance in terms of gain, efficiency, frequency stability, sidelobe levels, and return loss.