Design of Dual-polarization Stacked Arrays for Wireless Communications

Abstract

A novel dual-polarized stacked antenna array is designed and built for broadcasting satellite orbital positions. It is working in the 12.43-12.53GHz band (space-to-Earth). The patches in the bottom layer are fed diagonally by a microstrip line. The upper layer is stacked above the bottom one to increase the operating bandwidth. The design parameters are simulated and optimized using IE3D (Zeland) software to get the suitable S-parameters and radiation performance. The measured and simulated results are very close. The results show that the antenna seems very promising and useful for wireless applications. 1. INTRODUCTION During the last few years there has been an enormous expansion in wireless communication systems and the number of people using these services. The designed antenna is suitable for the 12GHz Broadcasting Satellite Service (BSS) frequency bands. It is working in the frequency band 12.43- 12.53GHz. In the usage of such antenna, besides having good performance, another main concern is the availability of a simple and low-cost antenna. Single-feed planar antennas can be easily integrated. This antenna has dual polarization. However, in order to reduce the polarization sensitivity of the antenna, the feed-point can be placed on the diagonal of the patch (1{4). The di-culty in building such an antenna array arises from simultaneously trying to meet two opposing design requirements. The designed array antenna is shown in Figure 1, has a gain of 9.9dBi, with a minimum half-power beamwidth (HPBW) (13:2356 - , 75:3584 - ) and antenna e-ciency is nearly 74%. A simulation is carried out to investigate the efiects of varying several physical parameters such as dummy patch size, spacing between the lower and upper patches, and spacing between the patches. The impedance characteristics, radiation pattern, return loss (S11), and voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) for the designed array are simulated and analyzed using IE3D (Zeland) software. S11 and VSWR are measured and compared with the simulated one. x