Design of a dual-CP gap waveguide fed aperture array antenna

Journal article, 2023

A slot array antenna with dual-circular polarisation (CP) is presented in this paper. To overcome the fabrication and loss challenges in mm-wave frequencies, the gap waveguide technique is utilised. The right and left hand circular polarisation (RHCP and LHCP) radiations are achieved using slots-fed stepped septum polariser on the longitudinal slot arrays. The waveguides and feeding layer are based on ridge gap waveguide. The experimental results demonstrate the |S-11| and axial ratio of proposed antenna array are lower than -10 and 2 dB, respectively over the frequency range of 29.1-31.7 GHz. The proposed antenna exhibits the measured peak gain of 27.2 dBic at 30.2 GHz. The results prove that the proposed array antenna is a brilliant choice for 30 GHz-band applications and could be developed to realise larger dual-polarised planar arrays.