Lightweight and Compact High-Gain Filtering Aperture Antenna Fabricated by Three-Dimensional Printing Technology

In this letter, a novel high-gain filtering aperture antenna is proposed. It consists of five resonators, four of which have radiation apertures in the end and are coupled to the fifth one in the center by dislocation. Such a mechanism gets rid of conventional irises and, hence, saves volume to some extent. The proposed antenna is characterized by a second-order Chebyshev bandpass response. Simultaneously, high gain is achieved through four radiation apertures. In order to minimize its size and weight, three-dimensional printing technology is adopted for fabrication. Finally, an antenna prototype with a center frequency of 34 GHz is designed, fabricated, and measured. The measured results show that the fractional bandwidth is 2.94% covering from 33.5 to 34.5 GHz, with the gain of 12.51 dBi. Besides, it only weighs 2.63 g for the adopted polymer material.