Comparison between 2 3D-Printed 2×2 Horn Antenna Arrays at 12.5GHz with Different Feeding Structures

This work introduces a comparison between H- and E-plane-network to feed antenna arrays. Due to the increasing demand for a low cost and a low weight antenna array for different communication applications. In addition to comparing between horn antennas and sub-arrays as aperture elements for both feeding networks, a 2×2 E-plane fed waveguide antenna array comprised of 2×2 aperture elements sub-arrays is designed to operate at 12.5 GHz. The proposed design is fabricated using 3D-printing technology from polymer and metalized in 2 different methods to demonstrate the advantages and challenges of each method. The fabricated design exhibits 16.2% fractional bandwidth with 18 dBi gain and around 16.2% efficiency at the operating frequency which showed good agreement with the simulated results.