Low-cost and easy manufactured dielectric rod antennas based on 3D printing technology

Novel dielectric rod antennas (DRAs) are proposed in this article with the merits of low-cost and easy fabrication. The printed log-periodic dipole array is introduced as a feeding source. The cylinder-shaped rods are perforated with air holes of different shapes and sizes to vary the spatial effective permittivity distribution, which mimics the arrangement of traditional multilayer rod antennas. Comparing with traditional multilayer rods, the proposed DRAs use only a single type of dielectric material while achieving similar bandwidth and gain increment performances. Thanks to 3D printing technology, the proposed antennas can be designed with much increased flexibility. Meanwhile, the fabrication cost and complexity can be drastically reduced, since only a single type of dielectric material is needed. Furthermore, both rod antennas were fabricated and measured. The proposed rod antennas have peak gains of 13.32 to 13.45 dBi, 1-dB gain bandwidth of 25.2% to 26% and average gains of 12 to 12.5 dBi.