Circularly polarized feed for cylindrical parabolic reflector antennas

The feed design described is a linear array of crossed dipoles above a ground plane. The radiation patterns of the longitudinal and the transverse dipoles are made equal by parallel longitudinal rods, referred to as beam forming rods or beam matching rods. When used as a circularly polarized feed for an offset parabolic cylinder antenna, aperture efficiencies (spillover included) as high as 0.89 are potentially available if the field distribution along the array is uniform. The beam patterns of the feed were computed both by the method of moments and the geometrical theory of diffraction and are compared with patterns measured on a model at 1.5 GHz. A method of matching the impedance for both linear polarizations is proposed using parallel impedance matching rods.