A Reflectarray-Based Dual-Surface Reflector Working in Circular Polarization

This paper presents the design of a dual-surface reflector (DSR) antenna working in dual circular polarization (CP). This DSR consists in a linearly polarized dual-gridded reflector (DGR) that is made of a solid parabolic reflector on which a reflectarray that reflects horizontal polarization (HP) and is transparent to the vertical polarization (VP) is affixed. The conversion from linear polarization (LP) to CP of this antenna is realized by introducing a three-layer meander-line circular polarizer optimized for oblique incidence. The antenna system was designed to generate two main beams in different directions and orthogonal CPs. This antenna has been fabricated and characterized. For the two polarizations, the realized gain is higher than 30 dB with a cross-polarization discrimination (XPD) higher than 27 dB in the 18–20 GHz frequency band.