Substrate Integrated Horn Antenna With Uniform Aperture Distribution

A new substrate integrated horn antenna with hard side walls combined with a couple of soft surfaces is introduced. The horn takes advantage of the air medium for propagation inside, while having a thickness of dielectric on the walls to realize hard conditions. The covering layers of the air-filled horn are equipped with strip-via arrays, which act as soft surfaces around the horn aperture to reduce the back radiations. The uniform amplitude distribution of the aperture resulting from the hard conditions and the phase correction combined with the profiled horn walls provided a narrow beamwidth and -13 dB sidelobe levels in the frequency of the hard condition, which is validated by the simulated and measured results.