Phase center of an H-plane sectoral horn between parallel conductor plates

Abstract

In feeding parallel plate slot arrays with plane waves propagating between parallel conductor plates, a dielectric plate lens or a parabolic cylindrical reflector is often used to generate the plane waves. Such a lens or a reflector requires a point source at its focus, since these lenses are designed by using a geometrical optics approach and actually are fed by H-plane sectoral horns. However, it is impossible to regard the horn as a point source, because its aperture is generally several wavelengths. Thus it is essential to determine the phase center of the sectoral horn in order to put the feeding system to practical use. Moreover, the lens and reflector are usually placed in the Fresnel region of the horn and are designed to operate at the widest feeding angle possible. In this paper a method to determine the phase center of the horn that is applicable in the wide angle Fresnel region is proposed, and several charts for its location are presented. This method is ascertained to be fully practical by means of several numerical and experimental investigations. A trial-fabricated plate dielectric lens and an offset parabolic cylindrical reflector were tested and found to operate approximately in accordance with the principles of geometrical optics, if their focii are arranged on the phase centers given in this paper. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 82(3): 28–38, 1999