Conical Ground Helical Antenna with Feed-Through Insulator for High-Power Microwave Applications

Abstract

In this paper, a novel helical antenna for high-power microwave is proposed. The proposed antenna is intended to demonstrate improved power handling capacity without any deterioration in matching characteristics, gain, and axial ratio. The proposed antenna with a long helix structure is investigated in order to achieve high gain and a relatively wide impedance bandwidth. By increasing the distance between the helix and the ground plane, an improved power handling capacity is obtained, and the impedance matching problem caused by the proposed method is addressed with the use of a feed-through insulator. In addition, a conical-shaped ground is used to compensate for the gain reduction by increasing the distance between the helix and the ground plane. As a result, the proposed antenna exhibits a gain exceeding 11 dBi and an axial ratio of less than 2 dB within the frequency range of 0.86–1.09 GHz. In addition, its power handling capacity exceeds 50 MW for a 0.7-ns input pulse length in air conditions.

Keywords

• circular polarization
• helical antenna
• high-power microwaves