Stainless Steel Laser-Sintered 3D Printed Corrugated Horn Antennas at Ka Band

The viability of stainless steel as the constituent material for 3D printed corrugated conical horn antennas at Ka Band is explored in this work. Three identical corrugated antennas are fabricated to assess the impact of different levels of post processing on the metal surface. A fourth conical horn antenna without corrugations was fabricated using the same metal 3D printing process. This ‘basic’ horn antenna is used as a baseline performance comparator for the corrugated horns. Measurements show that the 3D printed corrugated horn can deliver a peak realized gain of 19.3 dBi at 38.5 GHz and a cross-polar discrimination (XPD) in the $\vec{E}$ plane below 22.8 dB at 28 GHz and below 27.5 dB at 40 GHz. The XPD performance in the $\vec{H}$ is below 23 dB at 28 GHz and below 32.8 dB at 40 GHz.