All-Metallic, H-Shaped Magneto-Electric Dipole Antenna With Ultra-Wide Bandwidth Fed by a Hollow Waveguide

An all-metallic, cavity backed magneto-electric (ME) dipole antenna in the Ka-band is proposed. The antenna consists of three metal layers combined to exhibit ultra-wide impedance bandwidth and high efficiency performance. The proposed design can be transformed into a planar antenna array while maintaining its wide bandwidth characteristics along with reasonable inter-element spacing. The structure is easy to realize through precision CNC milling technique as well as through 3D printing technology. An antenna element exhibits a gain of up to 10.3 dBi and an impedance bandwidth of about 65% from 27.5GHz to 54GHz and efficiency greater than 90% respectively. The three layers of the antenna include a radiating layer where lies a magneto-electric (ME) dipole element, a cavity layer for bandwidth enhancement and hollow waveguide based feed layer. For planar antenna array design, four such antenna elements can be combined against one cavity and fed by a hollow waveguide at the bottom layer. Low-loss and compact T-junction power dividers can be incorporated in the feed network layer for best antenna performance. The proposed magneto-electric (ME) dipole has a wide range of applications for broad bandwidth millimeter-wave wireless communication.