Wideband Circularly Polarized Ellipse Antenna Array with Gain Enhancement

Abstract

In this paper, a wideband circularly polarized (CP) antenna element and array with gain enhancement are presented. The original antenna element adopts two orthogonal ellipse dipoles with end-loading pillars. In order to achieve a wide impedance bandwidth (IBW), a harpoon-shaped feed patch (HSFP) as electromagnetic coupling-feed is utilized. By introducing a coupled frame and a loop cavity, the gain of the element is crucially improved. Then, four sequentially rotated elements placed in a circular contour act as 2 × 2 array, and a similar loop metal cavity is employed to the array to reach gain enhancement. For the wideband CP performance of the proposed antenna, a wideband phase shifting feed network (WPSFN) is used to construct the antenna. Finally, to verify the feasibility of the proposed antenna, a prototype array is manufactured and measured. Experimental results are found in acceptable agreement with the simulated ones in terms of gain, radiation efficiency, radiation pattern, reflection coefficient, and axial ratio (AR). The result indicates that the proposed antenna has an IBW for reflection coefficient S11 ≤ − 10 dB of 85.7% (0.80–2.00 GHz). Moreover, benefit from the sequentially rotated technique (SRT), the AR at broadside direction keeps blow 3 dB during the overlapped bandwidth of S11≤ − 10 dB, and the ARBW for AR ≤ 1 dB of 74.4% (0.85–1.78 GHz) can be achieved. By employing the loop cavity, the right hand circularly polarization (RHCP) gain is significantly improved, which keeps above 10.00 dBic from 1.05 GHz to 1.85 GHz, and the peak gain reaches to 13.91 dBic.