A circularly polarized Dual-Gridded Reflector prototype with a meander-line circular polarizer

A Dual-Gridded Reflector (DGR) is a reflector antenna working in dual linear polarization (LP) and is widely used on satellites. It allows the replacement of two orthogonally polarized reflector systems with different coverages by a single aperture system. In this paper, a simple prototype of a dual circularly polarized (CP) DGR is presented. It is based on a compound of an LP DGR and a three-layer meander-line circular polarizer to convert LP waves into CP waves and vice versa. Moreover, because of its simple architecture, the proposed structure is low-risk and low-cost. The results show that the performances are good enough to be used for satellite applications in the Ka transmit band.