The Trapezoidal Dielectric Resonator Antenna

The operational concepts of the trapezoidal dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs) are presented and their performance is studied theoretically and experimentally. The rectangular parallelepiped is a special case of the more general trapezoid and therefore a comparison between both is useful in order to highlight their similarities and differences. It is shown in this paper that the inverted trapezoidal DRA exhibits a significantly larger impedance bandwidth than the rectangular parallelepiped, while the rest of their properties remain similar. Based on that, two versions of a probe-fed wide-band linearly polarized (LP) DRA are designed by combing the resonances of the first two lower-order modes of the trapezoidal DRA. The resulting impedance bandwidth exceeds 55% (S₁₁ < -10 dB) and the patterns are broadside with low cross-polarization. The antennas are simple to fabricate and they can be easily made to be mechanically stable. The numerical analysis was performed with a commercially available FEM solver and an in-house developed finite-volume-time-domain (FVTD) code. The measurements confirmed the results of the simulations.