A Low VSWR and High Efficiency Waveguide Feed Antenna Array.

A low VSWR and high efficiency antenna array operating in the Ku band for satellite communications is presented in this paper. To achieve high radiation efficiency and broad enough bandwidth, all-metal radiation elements and full-corporate waveguide feeding network are employed. As the general milling method is used in the multilayer antenna array fabrication, the E-plane waveguide feeding network is adopted here to suppress the wave leakage caused by the imperfect connectivity between adjacent layers. A 4 × 8 elements array prototype was fabricated and tested for verification. The measured results of proposed antenna array show bandwidth of 6.9% (13.9-14.8GHz) for VSWR < 1.5. Furthermore, antenna gain and efficiency of higher than 22.2 dBi and 80% are also exhibited, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]