Circularly polarized dielectric-loaded planar antenna excited bythe parallel feeding waveguide network

A new receiving planar array antenna for DBS (direct broadcasting satellite) is proposed. The element antenna is a short waveguide aperture mounted in the ground plane, loaded with a dielectric and polarizers, and excited through its side wall by another feeding rectangular waveguide. The gain of the element antenna loaded with a dielectric is so high that the grating lobes can be reduced sufficiently even if the element spacing in the array is wider than the wavelength in free space. Therefore we can reduce the number of the array elements, and parallel feeding by the low loss waveguide network can be feasible to provide a planar array antenna. This paper describes the experimental results of several kinds of the circularly polarized dielectric-loaded element antennas and the planar antennas fed by the waveguide network. In the 12 GHz band the planar antenna with 64-element radiators has a maximum gain of 31.9 dBi with an aperture efficiency of 94.7%, the 1 dB-down frequency bandwidth of the gain is about 800 MHz (6.7% for a center frequency of 11.85 GHz), and the frequency bandwidth of the axial ratio is less than 1 dB of 850 MHz (7.2%)