Design and fabrication of a lightweight additive-manufactured Ka-band horn antenna array

In this paper a 2×2 Ka-band lightweight horn antenna array demonstrator is designed and fabricated by means of an additive manufacturing process optimized for complex RF, microwave and mm-wave antenna components. The proposed waveguide feeding network aims to exploit the flexibility offered by this novel fabrication technique and can be easily translated to antenna arrays with more elements. The electromagnetic performance of the featured structure is validated by means of full-wave numerical simulations. The horn antenna array is fabricated and under experimental RF characterization.