An additive manufactured K-Band Waveguide Coupler and K-Band Antennas in SLM-Technology

3D printing offers a very innovative opportunity for creating cheap or special rf-components like waveguides, couplers or antennas. However, these components require electrical conductive materials to be built of. Therefore, selective laser melting of metal powder is also an attractive production technology. In this paper, horn antennas and a directional coupler at 24GHz are shown and their production technologies are compared. By presenting a K-band branchline coupler it is shown that selective laser melting has some advantages over 3D printing.