Design and Development of 3D-Printed Meta-Mirror Antenna for Satellite Links at FR-2 Band of 5G Communication

In this paper, a low-profile 3D-printed dielectric meta-mirror(DMM) antenna is designed and developed for ultra-wideband operation of satellite links at FR-2 band of 5G communication. DMM is designed by placing subwavelength unit cells of size
$0.28\lambda_{0}\times 0.28\lambda_{0}$
(where
$\lambda_{0}$
is free-space wavelength at design frequency i.e. 28 GHz) in an array of 18×18. This results in an overall aperture dimension of
$5.04\lambda_){0}\times 5.04\lambda_{0}$
. The complete DMM antenna comprises of 3D-printed dielectric horn placed 100 mm distance apart from the proposed DMM along +z-direction with a help of 3D-printed support structure. The proposed DMM antenna is printed using additive manufacturing process and further characterized for its performance in anechoic chamber. The measured gain of the proposed DMM antenna ranges from 24.2 dBi to 21.3 dBi from 22.4 GHz to 34.8 GHz with 3-dB gain bandwidth of 43 %. Measured maximum gain of 24.2 dBi at 28 GHz is realized resulting in a gain improvement of 10.1 dB. This results in a maximum aperture efficiency of 82.4 % which is in agreement with the theoretical limit calculated taking into account the spillover and edge-taper losses.