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Dual-ridge horn antennas are commonly used as wideband gain standards for antenna measurements. The horn is connectorized and essentially an open, flared ridge waveguide with lateral bars. It is designed to harmonize the gain with the frequency curve. At low frequencies the bars appear as a closed surface and increase the boresight gain of the horn, whereas at high frequencies the bars are electrically transparent and the effective gain decreases. Carefully designed dual ridge horns have excellent return loss, cross polar and flat gain response (typically 7-15 dBi) in a 1:15 frequency range.

The antenna is modelled and simulated in CST MICROWAVE STUDIO (CST MWS) using magnetic symmetry condition in the E-plane of the antenna and a rather coarse regular mesh with /10 spacing.

The used connectors are approximated with simple structures, and dielectric materials are ignored. For the calculations, perfectly conducting material is assumed for the metallic parts, and PML (Perfect Matching Layer) absorbing boundary conditions are used. The required CPU time for a full analysis is approximately four hours on a Pentium 4, 3 GHz PC.

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•Application Note: Advanced Modeling And Measurement Of Wideband Horn Antennas