An Assembly-Free 3D-Printed 5G Base-Station Antenna

In this paper, a 5G base-station antenna (BSA) made by 3D printing technology without any post-assembly process is proposed. The overall structure only consists of a main dipole radiator with feeding supporter and a ground reflector with baffles. The printed antenna presented in this work eliminates the tedious process of BSA assembly in a traditional way, though metallization and connector/cable soldering are still required in post-processing. Obviously, by using this novel approach, the producing efficiency of the BSA can be greatly improved and the manufacturing cost could be largely reduced, while satisfactory antenna performance can still be maintained at the same time. Simulation results show that the proposed antenna is able to cover the frequency band of 3.25 GHz~4.14 GHz with isolation better that 20 dB.