Broadband Dual-Polarized Loop Cross-Dipole Antenna for 5G Base Station Applications

Abstract

A broadband dual-polarized base station antenna is proposed in this paper. The antenna consists of loop cross-dipoles, Y-shaped coupling feeding lines, and a metal box reflector. An equivalent circuit model including a signal flow diagram is established to analyze the mechanism of the proposed antenna in detail. Moreover, the Y-shaped coupling feeding lines are introduced to control the coupling with the antenna to achieve broadband and good impedance matching. The prototype of the antenna is fabricated and measured. The measured results show that the antenna with simple structures can operate at the band of 3.2–5.22 GHz (48%) with high port-to-port isolation (35 dB) and stable gain (9 ± 1 dBi). The measured results show good agreement with simulated results, especially in cross-polarization discrimination ratio (>27 dB) and the half power beam width (61° ± 3° at the E-plane, 68° ± 3° at the H-plane). In summary, the proposed antenna could be a good candidate for 5G sub-6 GHz base station applications.