SLA Printed Dual-Band Conical-Beam Filtering Antenna

In this letter, a three-dimensional-printed dual-band conical-beam filtering antenna is investigated in the K- and Ka- bands. The proposed antenna is composed of a nested horn antenna, a dual-mode filtering network and a 1-to-4 filtering divider. The nested horn antenna is used for realizing conical-beam radiation, the dual-mode spherical filtering network for feeding the inner waveguide horn in the Ka-band, and the filtering divider network for feeding the outer coaxial horn in the K-band. The stereo lithography apparatus with copper plating technology is employed to fabricate the antenna for demonstration. The measurement results of the prototype demonstrate the operating bandwidths (return loss > 10 dB) at 24.2-25.3 GHz and 32.8-34.9 GHz. The maximum gains are 8.8 and 6.4 dBi in the K-band at the beam-pointing angle of 23° and in the Ka-band at 38°, correspondingly. The advantages of the dual-band conical-beam pattern in this study, namely low cost, high efficiency, and excellent out-of-band suppression, ensuring a promising outlook for the implementation of millimeter wave detection and fuze systems.