3D print X-band horn antenna for ground-based SAR application

Abstract

The Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GB-SAR) system is developed in our research. The system which is proposed for landslide monitoring operates in X-band frequency with the center frequency 10 GHz. In this paper, the light pyramidal X-band horn antenna implemented for the system is presented. The optimization of antenna design is carried out using CST software. Based on the optimum design, the proposed pyramidal X-band horn antenna is fabricated using a high resolution 3D printer with a polylactic acid (PLA) applied as 3D printing filaments. The printed antenna is then coated using polyurethane on its surface. From the characterization result, it shows that the working bandwidth of proposed pyramidal X-band horn antenna is about 2.9 GHz with reflection coefficient of −69 dB and −16 dB for simulation and measurement, respectively. A good agreement has been achieved between the simulated and measured results indicating that the proposed antenna has satisfied for our GB-SAR system.