A coplanar waveguide fed rectangular reconfigurable patch antenna with switchable strips for polarization diversity

Abstract

A compact single feed rectangular patch antenna with reconfigurable circular polarization has been proposed in this paper. The basic antenna structure is a rectangular patch of dimensions 10 mm x 15 mm printed on a thin FR4 substrate of thickness 3 mm. Two rectangular strips are connected through switches at sideways of the main patch to get polarization diversity. The polarization of the proposed antenna can be reconfigured between left hand circular polarization (LHCP) and right hand circular polarization (RHCP) by the current path, which is changed by operating the switches in ON and OFF modes. The antenna is designed and simulated using IE3D MoM based electromagnetic simulator. The simulated results show good return loss, radiation pattern, axial ratio and acceptable gain at the operating frequency. The antenna has around 15 % effective impedance bandwidth over 4.0 GHz - 4.8 GHz frequency band at a maximum gain of 3.0 dBi with polarization diversity