Design and Simulation of a Wideband Dualpolarized Conical Doubleridged Horn Antenna

Dual-polarized antennas are widely used in many fields including measurements, equipments, electromagnetic compatibility tests, electronic warfare, etc. These antennas in pyramidal horn shape have been investigated before. In this paper, the design and analysis of a dual polarized doubleridged conical horn antenna with dual polarization, high gain and low cross polarization for wide band applications is presented. These antennas have higher gain and lower side lobe level than pyramidal antennas. The designed antenna has a voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) less than 2.5 for the frequency range of 8-18 GHz. Moreover, the proposed antenna exhibits a very good dual polarization, low cross polarization, low side lobe level, high gain, and relatively stable far-field radiation characteristics in the entire operating bandwidth.. Quad-ridged horn antennas also can produce dual polarization but these antennas have two input ports and have hard manufacturing processes. In this paper, a five layers slant linear polarizer is used. Five layer polarizer has lower VSWR than other multilayer polarizer. In order to achieve dual polarizations, the strips width, spacing between two adjacent strips and dielectric layers thickness are optimized. Dielectric material between layers is Styrofoam (epsilon = 1.03). The proposed antenna is simulated with commercially available packages, such as CST Microwave Studio (Sax Software Corp.) and Ansoft HFSS (Ansoft Corp.), in the operating frequency range. Excellent agreement is observed between two simulation results. The best result is achieved for lambda/4 strips spacing where lambda is the wave length at the mid frequency. Simulation results agree with the theoretical results. Simulation results for the VSWR, radiation patterns, and gain of the designed antenna over the frequency band 8-18 GHz are presented and discussed.