Beamwidth Control of a Helical Antenna Using Truncated Conical Plasma Reflectors

This paper presents an approach to simultaneous beamwidth and gain control in a circular-polarization helical antenna using a truncated conical plasma reflector. Requirements and trade-offs regarding the feasible structure of the antenna are discussed. Performance of the proposed antenna is confirmed by full-wave simulations. The results show that the proposed plasma reflector can be used to improve the radiation gain of the considered helical antenna up to around 17%.