Design of a parabolic reflector antenna with a compact splash-plate feed

Abstract

A parabolic reflector antenna with a compact splash-plate feed is designed and optimized in this paper. A dielectric connection portion is used to combine the waveguide and splash-plate sub-reflector. The use of dielectric material not only can achieve low blockage as no struts are needed to support the feed, but also can adjust the impedance of the antenna. The designed antenna is able to achieve a low VSWR <; 1.17 within the frequency range of 21.2 GHz-23 GHz. In addition, some chokes are added on the back of the splash-plate to suppress the radiation of the undesired directions. A corrugated fence is added along the edge of parabolic reflector to achieve better performance, in which the front to back ratio is significantly improved. The gain of the designed parabolic reflector antenna is 40.1-41.06 dBi within 21.2 GHz-23 GHz. Moreover, by using the designed splash-plate feed, simulation results show that the radiation efficiency of the parabolic reflector antenna is about 57.7%-62.5% within the operation bandwidth.