A Wideband Sequential-Phase Fed Circularly Polarized Patch Array

Abstract

This communication presents a wideband circularly polarized (CP) 2 × 2 patch array using a sequential-phase feeding network. By combining three operating modes, both axial ratio (AR) and impedance bandwidths are enhanced and wider than those of previous published sequential-fed single-layer patch arrays. These three CP operating modes are tuned and matched by optimizing the truncated corners of patch elements and the sequential-phase feeding network. A prototype of the proposed patch array is built to validate the design experimentally. The measured -10-dB impedance bandwidth is 1.03 GHz (5.20-6.23 GHz), and the measured 3-dB AR bandwidth is 0.7 GHz (5.25-5.95 GHz), or 12.7% corresponding to the center frequency of 5.5 GHz. The measured peak gain is about 12 dBic and the gain variation is less than 3 dB within the AR bandwidth.