Design of a Novel Compact Cup Feed for Parabolic Reflector Antennas

This paper describes the concept and design of a novel compact self-supported cup feed antenna for parabolic reflectors. The feed antenna consists of an open waveguide cup which is excited by a disk loaded dipole. This structure is fed by a coaxial waveguide through a split-coaxial balun and has a rear radiation pattern toward the reflector antenna. Two different types of this configuration are designed in this paper: a linearly-polarized grid reflector antenna fed by a single dipole excitation, and a circularly-polarized solid reflector antenna fed by a cross dipole excitation. The measurement is done for the former, and simulation results of the latter via two different software packages CST and HFSS are compared in this paper. Analyzing the results shows that both types of cup feed antenna have an excellent aperture efficiency and low side lobe level.