Recommendations on Designing Wire Grid Conical Horn Structures for Sparse Antenna Generation

The method of moments is widely used with wire grid to analyze and design different types of antennas. Researchers provided several recommendations on designing wire grid structures. However, these recommendations are not suitable for generating initial wire grid structures on which the optimal current grid approximation approach can be applied. These structures are required for generating sparse antenna structures with less mass. In this paper, new recommendations on generating initial wire grid structures of conical horn antennas are proposed. These new recommendations form a novel design guide that considers specific conical horn wire grid structures with different equivalent excitation models. The effectiveness of this design guide is verified by applying it to conical horn antennas operating in different frequency bands. The obtained antenna characteristics of the resulting wire grid structures are compared with those obtained experimentally and numerically using other methods. The compared results agreed well. The results of this paper can enable antenna designers to quickly and accurately design initial wire grid structures of conical horn antennas with acceptable characteristics for efficient sparse antenna generation.