A Wideband High-Gain Dielectric Horn-Lens Antenna for Wireless Communications and UWB Applications

A wideband high-gain dielectric horn-lens antenna (DHLA) for wireless communications and ultra-wideband (UWB) applications, featuring 122% fractional bandwidth, is presented. The antenna, consisting of a dielectric horn equipped with a spherical-axicon dielectric lens that increases and equalizes the gain within the operating band, is placed on a PCB featuring a wideband eight-shaped slot fed by a tapered microstrip line employed to excite the radiating system. The lens, integrated within the body of the dielectric horn, has the property of focusing the RF energy near its vertex on an extended frequency band, thus ensuring compact size, excellent field coupling with the antenna excitation system, and a significant increase of antenna gain. The antenna operates in the 3–12.4 GHz frequency range with relatively flat group delay, making it suitable for operating with narrowband, broadband, and impulsive UWB signals. The antenna can work properly without or with a metal reflector useful to enhance gain (up to 19 dBi), improve the front-to-back ratio, and reduce the impact of the antenna characteristics from the installation site. CST Studio Suite, implementing a full-wave locally conformal finite integration technique (FIT), was employed to design and characterize the antenna. The antenna characteristics estimated numerically were found to be in good agreement with the experimental results performed on an antenna prototype.