Oblique incidence design of meander-line polarizers for dielectric lens antennas

A method to design planar multilayer meander-line polarizers is given. The proposed procedure is based on transmission line circuit theory and on full-wave unit cell analysis in frequency domain. The hybrid combination of those two techniques paves the way for the polarizer design process and avoids heavy full-wave optimizations. This procedure is originally aimed for polarizers acting on lens antennas and is suitable for plane waves impinging with arbitrary angles on the polarizer. To validate the proposed method, two polarizers have been manufactured in Ka-band, one for normal and one for oblique incidence. Designs, prototypes and measurements made on a complete Ka-band lens antenna subsystem are shown in this paper.