A Differentially Fed Dual-Polarized Filtering Patch Antenna With Good Stopband Suppression

Abstract

A differentially-fed dual-polarized filtering patch antenna with no extra filtering circuits involved is proposed. The filtering response is realized by symmetrically loading four short strips and a long cross-type strip, and a square ring slot to insert radiation zeros on the dual-polarized antenna element. The short and long strips can generate two transmission zeros at lower and upper band edges, respectively, leading to a sharp skirt selectivity. In addition, the long cross-type strip and the square ring slot can respectively introduce an extra resonance close to the original one, broadening the impedance bandwidth. Also, the equivalent circuit is presented to show that the two zeros can be brought by the two equivalent series resonant circuits extracted from the short/long strips resulting in the bandpass response. We may note that the proposed filtering structure owns the merits of simple, compact and complete symmetry, thus it can be well integrated with the dual- polarized antenna. Consequently, a compact and high-gain dual- polarized filtering antenna with good stopband suppression, low cross-polarization level and symmetrical radiation patterns is obtained. It can achieve an impedance bandwidth about 15% and a maximum gain of 8.4 dBi. The simulated cross-polarization level is below -40 dB, and the measured one is lower than -22 dB. Moreover, the upper stopband can be up to 2.6 f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> (f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> is the center frequency of the antenna), where the stopband radiations from all the directions can be suppressed and the measured suppression ratio can reach 90%.