3-D Ceramic Printed Wideband Circularly Polarized Quadrifilar Helix Dielectric Antenna

A wideband circularly polarized (CP) quadrifilar helix dielectric antenna (QHDA) using 3-D ceramic printed technology is presented in this letter. In the design, the helix dielectric is employed as the radiator instead of the traditional metal structure to generate the CP radiation. The novel 3-D ceramic printed technology is a simple process method for constructing the helix dielectric. A wideband one-quarter phase-shifting network, consisting of the Wilkinson power splitter and the 90° and 180° phase-shifters, is adopted to achieve the wideband stable output phase difference of 90° for feeding the QHDA. In order to verify the design, the antenna is fabricated by 3-D printing technology and measured. The measurement results show that the proposed QHDA achieves the impedance bandwidth of 77.1% (1.175 GHz to 2.65 GHz), the axial ratio bandwidth of 86.6% (1.1 GHz to 2.78 GHz) and the peak gain of 10.4 dBic.