Quad-ridged conical horn antenna for wideband applications

This article presents a quad‐ridged conical horn antenna with high gain and low side lobe level for broadband applications. To the best of authors' knowledge, the proposed structure presented in this article is completely new. The designed antenna introduces a low VSWR, which is lower than 2.2 for the frequency range of 8–18 GHz, and simultaneously achieves high gain as well as dual‐polarizations with high isolation between the corresponding excitations. The common impedance exponential tapering is used at the flare section of the horn, and a coax to waveguide transition, namely quadruple‐ridged circular waveguide, with a conical cavity is used to improve the VSWR. The proposed antenna structure is designed and simulated by two well established packages, namely the CST microwave studio and the Ansoft HFSS, showing there is a close agreement between the results obtained by the aforementioned softwares. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2009.