A concise design of large mm-Wave Radial Line Slot Antenna with honeycomb structures for space application

This paper reviews the state of the art concise design of a large aperture Radial Line Slot Antenna (RLSA) in millimeter waves to be used as a satellite on-board antenna. Honeycomb structures are employed as core of the dielectric spacer to reduce the antenna's weight. We derived an equivalent model for the design and analysis of large size RLSA, where four layers honeycomb radial line is replaced by a two layers dielectrics sheets. A constant slot correction length is introduced to utilize the Moment method for neglect of higher order modes. Several prototypical RLSAs are manufactured based on this concise design; a 90cm RLSA with a gain of 44.6dB at 32GHz, and the weight of only 1kg, is currently the best and promising for satellite on-board antennas.