Circularly polarised integrated filtering antenna with polarisation reconfigurability

Abstract

A new design of circularly polarized (CP) integrated filtering antennas with reconfigurable polarization is proposed in this paper. Two phase-reconfigurable coupled λ/2-resonator pairs have been used to feed the antenna and generate the 2nd-order filtering response and the circular polarization simultaneously. By switching the PIN diodes inserted in the feeding network, a phase difference of +90° or - 90° can be realized at the outputs of the feeding network. This renders the antenna’s capability of switching its polarization from right hand circular polarization (RHCP) to left hand circular polarization (LHCP) or vice versa. The use of the coupled-resonator pairs significantly improves the frequency selectivity and out-of-band rejection of the CP antenna. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first report of a multifunctional antenna which has integrated filtering performance, circular polarization and polarization reconfigurability. To verify the design concept, a reconfigurable CP antenna operating at 2.45 GHz is implemented. The simulated and measured results agree well with each other and show that the antenna has an impedance bandwidth of 4.5 %, an average in-band gain of 6.0 dBic (LHCP)/6.1 dBic (RHCP), out-of-band rejections of greater than 10.8 dB, and 3-dB AR bandwidth of 9.4 %/10.5 %.