Front-to-back ratio improvement of a short pyramidal horn antenna using metal strips/rods in LTE/cellular band

This study presents a very short pyramidal horn antenna for monitoring the radiation characteristics of mobile base-station (BS) antennas operating in the long-term evolution (LTE)/cellular band. The proposed short pyramidal horn is integrated with metal strips/rods to overcome deficiencies of the shortened horn, especially in its front-to-back (F/B) ratio. The proposed short horn antenna improves the average F/B ratio by at least 8 dB in the frequency range from 690–960 MHz by controlling the edge diffraction. The total length of the antenna, including a waveguide flange, is only approximately 0.6 λ at 800 MHz. The proposed antenna also retains good characteristics such as a monotonically increasing gain, wide bandwidth, and a good purity of polarisation. The proposed antenna can replace the dipole antenna as a reference gain antenna for both indoor and outdoor measurement systems below the L-band.