Building a Cantenna from a Pringles can

After designing a Cantenna at 2.45 GHz, Wilco (a 2nd year engineering student from the university, doing vacation work for us) went to the local grocery store to see if he could find a can with the right dimensions. All the cans with the right diameter at 2.45 GHz were too short so he bought a can of large Pringles chips. After we ate the chips he adjusted the design to fit the inner diameter of the Pringles can and cut it to the right length. The new design worked at 2.85 GHz. The inside of the can is lined with a thin aluminium sheet with a thin wax coating which saved a lot of effort – not having to stick conducting material on the inside ourselves. 

He soldered the sma connector onto a small copper plate (shown inthe next image) and attached it to the waveguide with two small screwsafter sanding off the wax coating on the inside to assure good contactwith the aluminum

The following image shows the inside of the antenna with the connectorand pin. We measured s11 and compared it with the simulation (see graphbelow) which had pretty good correlation. Most industrial cantennashave athin dielectric coating on the outside of the waveguide toprevent unwanted surface currents. We didn’t measure the dielectricproperties of the Pringles can but it seems like a very cheap,practical antenna with 8 dBi gain and 20% bandwidth at 2.85 GHz

For those who might want to try to make this antenna, I added theabove sketch showing the required physical parameters that will workusing a Pringles can operating at 2.85 GHz center frequency



Author: Robert Kellerman.



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