A printed parabolic reflector antenna for two-dimensional quasi-optical power combining

In this thesis, a novel printed parabolic reflector antenna suitable as a TE surface-wave launcher in a 2-D quasi-optical power combining scheme is presented. The antenna consists of two components, a feed antenna and a planar parabolic reflector. The feed antenna consists of a two element printed Yagi antenna and the parabolic reflector is created from a truncated ground plane shaped into a parabola. The antenna is designed using fundamental principals and refined through full-wave simulation. The proposed structure achieves a directivity of 6.39 dB which is substantially higher than the directivity of competing state-of-the-art printed Yagi antennas. Two such reflector antennas in a back-to-back configuration are designed to act as a power splitter/recombiner suitable for 2-D power combining. This two-port structure is characterized, and compared to conventional power combining technologies.