A Printed Design of Fabry-Perot Cavity Antenna with High Gain-Bandwidth Product

A printed Fabry-Perot cavity antenna (FPCA) is designed to achieve high gain-bandwidth product. The proposed FPCA uses printing technology to achieve a compact, lightweight, and low-cost design with improved mass production capabilities. The primary radiator is a rectangular microstrip patch with dual-offset aperture feeding. With the help of a novel version of aperture field theory, an engineered metal-grid superstrate is realized. In this study, EM simulation and experiments are used to validate the proposed concept and theory. The measured broadside gain of the fabricated antenna prototype reaches 17.4 dBi at 10 GHz and remains above 11.5 dBi over 62.5% of the impedance bandwidth (8.2-15.6 GHz). The proposed antenna offers a 3dB gain-bandwidth product (3dB-GBP) and an average gain-bandwidth product (AGBP) of 2033 and 1992, respectively. This has never been achieved from a printed FPCA before. Over the desired bandwidth, the front-to-back ratio (FBR) remains above 35 dB.