Effects of producing non-Luneburg lens antennas from effective media alternatives to the Luneburg lens

摘要

Natural plastic spherical lenses have been studied for applications requiring full hemisphere scan coverage. Homogeneous lenses give adequate performance up to radii of 5 free space wavelengths (27dBi). For higher gain larger apertures, a 2-layer lens was developed, which is being adapted for high speed train 20/30GHz satellite communications. Here, the effects of producing the 2-layer lens by additive manufacturing and machining from a single billet are considered, with example effective dielectrics been tested in a WR-90 test cell.