Advanced Design of High-Gain Fabry-Perot Cavity Antenna Offering Wide Common Impedance and Gain Bandwidth

An advanced design of a Fabry-Perot cavity antenna (FPCA) is proposed to achieve wide common impedance and gain bandwidth along with high gain. A compact and lightweight FPCA is achieved by employing a printed primary radiator and superstrate with superior manufacturing capabilities. A wideband primary radiator is employed for the first time to realize such a wideband FPCA. Superstrate dimensions are estimated by using the aperture field theory and the proposed design is validated through both EM simulation and experiment. The measured broadside gain is shown to be better than 11.5 dBi over an impedance bandwidth of 63% (8.2-15.6 GHz). About 40% common impedance and gain bandwidth is achieved while the broadside gain attains a maximum value of 17.4 dBi. To the best of our knowledge, this has never been achieved before from an FPCA made of a printed superstrate and a primary radiator. The cross-polar (XP) radiation remains under -40 dB whereas the front-to-back ratio remains above 35 dB, over the desired bandwidth.