A Low–Cost, Light–Weight, High–Efficiency Fabry–Perot Antenna

This paper presents a Fabry–Perot antenna (FPA) with low-cost, broadband, high-gain, and high radiation efficiency. Its feed is a patch antenna, which is covered by a partially reflective surface (PRS) of 8 × 8 square aperture array. For the low realization cost, the antenna feed and the PRS are printed on thin low-cost FR4 substrates. In order to mitigate the FR4 material loss, a technique of air-substrate is applied into the antenna feed. This paper focuses not only a gain enhancement, but also a bandwidth improvement of the proposed antenna as compared to the conventional patch antenna. The final design of 125 mm × 125 mm × 23.5 mm (about 2.4λ0 × 2.4λ0 × 0.45λ0 at 5.8 GHz) achieves a |S11| < −10 dB bandwidth of 15.2% (5.31–6.19 GHz), the peak gain of 14.03 dBi, and a radiation efficiency of >95%. The proposed FPA produces a 150% increase in impedance matching bandwidth and a ~5.46-dB increase in the broadside gain relative to the conventional patch antenna.