Vintage Antennas: A 3D-Printed Future

This paper presents the “reflector-horn array,” a novel configuration of the classical horn-reflector antenna developed for the 2024 Student Design Competition on “mmWave Dual-Band 3D-Printed Antenna Design.” The proposed array is composed of two truncated reflector antennas. The antenna is 3D-printed and silver-coated. It achieves a 54.9% height reduction compared to the traditional design, with an average gain of 27.35 dB and a mean aperture efficiency of 69.28% over a 40.6% bandwidth, which was validated by the measurements. Compared to the classical reflector antenna, the only drawback is a 10.55 dB increase in the side lobe level.