Air Substrate 2-D Planar Cavity Antenna With Chessboard Structure

In this letter, an air substrate two-dimensional chessboard cavity antenna with scalable radiating aperture is proposed for high-gain applications. The proposed cavity antenna is composed of M × N open cavity units, arranged properly in a planar chessboard topology structure. Benefiting from the structure scalability, a much larger radiating aperture with high gain can be achieved using an appropriate excitation approach. Another merit from the chessboard structure is the air-filled medium without suffering from the high dielectric loss for high-frequency usage. Each unit of the cavity antenna can be supported stably by the shorting sidewalls of itself and adjacent units, not by substrate as usual. To validate the design strategy, a 4 × 5 air-filled chessboard cavity antenna is built and tested. The peak gain of 17.28 dBi is measured in the operation band of 8.35-8.74 GHz (4.56%), exhibiting the potentials in the directional wireless communication applications.