A Low-Profile Perturbed Convex Conformal CDRA

A wideband, high-gain, low-profile perturbed CDRA with bent ground plane (GP) for X-band applications is presented. On a cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (CDRA), the effect of bent GP is analyzed; moreover, it is noted that at bent radius R = 60 mm, both the bandwidth and gain of the antenna are improved. The basic CDRA is perturbed, which lowers the effective permittivity of the CDRA and excites higher-order modes. This decrease in effective permittivity reduces the Q factor of the antenna, which boosts the bandwidth of the CDRA. At 11.5 GHz, 7 dBi peak gain is obtained, and the impedance bandwidth is 21%. The proposed DRA has a low profile of 0.16 λ0, where λ0 is the wavelength of the lower cutoff frequency.