Design and Research of a Broadband High-Gain Low-Profile Antenna

A broadband high-gain low-profile array antenna with a brick structure is presented in this paper. The array antenna is arranged in a 2 × 4 configuration, and a printed dipole antenna is taken as the element. Two elements along the E-plane are printed on a substrate as a subarray, and four subarrays along the H-plane are arranged orthogonally to the four-way power divider, meaning that the array is a brick structure. The proposed antenna can provide a relative bandwidth of 40% in the frequency range 1.2-1.8 GHz with return loss (RL) greater than 13 dB, a gain greater than 14 dBi, and a height less than 4/10 of the wavelength of the center frequency. The radiation efficiency of the proposed antenna is between 40% and 80% across the operating bandwidth as well as the horn antenna, and the height is only 1/8 of the horn antenna with the same aperture. Finally, a high-gain low-profile antenna with 17 and 20 dBi is provided, which has the same radiation efficiency as the horn, and this design is verified to be equally applicable to antennas with a higher gain.