Side lobe reduction in an X - Band horn antenna loaded by a wire medium

Abstract

Through electromagnetic simulation, the present work reports on a comparative study of the enhanced radiation properties of a standard X-band horn antenna loaded by a wire medium. Acting as an artificial dielectric, the wire medium consists of an array of parallel metallic wires installed into the antenna with the wires oriented in the direction of the incident electric field. As compared with the properties of the air horn antenna, the wire-medium antenna produces an appreciable reduction in the side-lobe levels with an improvement of 10 dB at 8.87 GHz in the first side lobe. For the wire-medium antenna, the E- and H-plane radiation patterns look similar, a property desired for precision radar and radiometric mapping systems.