Fabrication of the amendatory one-dimensional photonic crystals for SHF reflector antennas

As the applications of circular polarization (CP) antennas are widely used in the wireless communications, it is significant to improve the CP antenna performance in aspect of axial ratio at the boresite direction. A good CP performance is always desired. In this paper, we fabricate the amendatory one-dimensional photonic crystals for SHF reflector antenna based on previous simulation results to compensate the circular-polarization discrimination as encountered in many antenna's applications. The goal is to widen the beamwidth of radiation for crossed-dipole. The performance is evaluated by measuring the 3dB axial ratio. Transfer matrix theory of multi-layer theory is used to solve the field distribution cross layer. Although some tabulate plane-based (TPB) compensations can achieve a great improvement for the crossed-dipole based reflector antenna, but it can only compensate the CP in a specified direction and may distort in other directions. The one-dimensional approach can smooth the discrimination introduced by the reflector and noise. The energy distribution of TE/TM polarizations are regulated with a one dimensional photonic crystal to achieve a broader beamwidth, also the reflector antenna is fabricated and measured to validate the efficiency of the proposed approach. The measured results show that the beamwidth is much wider than that before compensation. The gain of 3D plot and the radiation patterns are also shown to verify if the side effect of compensation.