Creating a Gain Enhancement Technique for a Conical Horn Antenna by Adding a Wire Medium Structure at the Aperture

This paper proposes a technique for improving the conventional conical horn antenna for the X-band frequency using metamaterial on a wire medium structure. The main idea of this research is the application of the wire medium metamaterial to the conical horn's aperture for the enhancement of the horn's gain; this is done without changing the antenna's dimensions. The results show that the wire medium structure can increase the gain of a conventional conical horn antenna from approximately 17.7 dB to 20.9 dB (an increase of approximately 3.2 dB). A prototype antenna was fabricated, and its fundamental parameters including its reflection coefficient ( S₁₁ ), radiation patterns, and directive gain were measured. The simulated and measured results were very good. The wire medium structure of the proposed antenna improved the radiation pattern, enhanced the directivity, increased the gain, and reduced the side lobe level using a simple integrated wire medium structure.