Novel Cavity-Backed Filtering Antennas Based on Radiant Metal Block Structure

In this article, a radiant metal block structure is proposed for designing reduced-size cavity-backed filtering antenna. The method of characteristic mode analysis is used to investigate the characteristic current modes of the cubic metal block, one of which can maintain a high inherent radiation capacity over a wideband. In addition, the radiation quality factor of the utilized mode is described in detail. Based on this characteristic current mode, metal block antennas with different bandwidths can be designed to realize broadside radiation. The proposed metal block antenna element can maintain stable radiation characteristics in the passband and the realized gain is greater than 9 dBi. To design the filtering antennas, the proposed metal block is cascaded with traditional resonant cavities. A third-order metal block filtering antenna array is fabricated for verification. The measurement results are basically consistent with the simulated ones. The maximum measurement gain is 12.85 dBi and the gain in the passband is flat.