Experimental investigation on the radiation pattern of a horn antenna loaded by a wire medium

The present paper reports on the design, implementation, and tests of a wire medium to experimentally verify its effects on the performance of a standard X-band horn antenna loaded by such a bulk metamaterial medium. The wire medium is composed of a periodic array of 0.5-mm-diameter metallic wires arranged in a square pattern with lattice spacing of 10.0 mm and hosted in Styrofoam plates. Experimental measurements of the radiation pattern at 11.70 GHz show an enhancement of the side lobes while maintaining the antenna peak gain, indicating that the metamaterial wire medium introduces negligible loss into the loaded antenna.