Wideband Fabry-Pérot cavity antenna with overlapping feeds for Advanced Communications

This Master’s Thesis project suggests a general procedure to design a Fabry-Pérot Cavity (FPC) antenna with two feeding that can be used for K-band applications such as satellite communications. In order to better understand this kind of antennas, a theoretical introduction on Leaky-wave antenna (LWA) and their 2-D version is presented at the beginning. Then, the antenna design starting from the basic unit cell is presented, explaining each step and showing several combinations of the FPC antenna parameter, in particular cavity height and distance between the feeding point of the two patch, in order to find the best solution for the broadside gain. Moreover, an optimization for the patch dimensions has been carried out in order to have good matching at the two main working frequencies. The final antenna is composed by two coaxial fed patch antennas on a RT5880 (h = 0.787mm, er = 2.2 and d = 0.0009), an air cavity and a Partially Reflective Surface (PRS), on a RO3010 dielectric (h = 0.64mm, er = 11.2 and d = 0.0022), with 14x14 unit cells. The designed antenna shows a wide bandwidth, almost 6 GHz, within 18-28 frequency range with a maximum gain of 13.5dB at the two main frequencies of operation: 20.7 GHz and 24.3 GHz. Furthermore, the structure has been fabricated and a comparison between its measurements and simulations has been carried out. The project and the final test have been carried out in between the University of California Irvine (UCI) and the Politecnico of Torino.