High-gain bidirectional MDAS antenna design excited by stacked-microstrip dipole

Abstract

In this paper, we present a high-gain bidirectional antenna design where two identical multilayered disk array structures (MDASs) were attached to a new stacked-microstrip dipole exciter in its directions of propagation. The stacked-microstrip dipole exciter is described as two identical stacked-microstrip patches placed back to back with a common substrate between them and fed with the balanced power. MDAS, where diameter of the disks was chosen to be slightly shorter than its resonating length, and the spacing between them was carefully defined to carry out the role of a director for slow-wave propagation, improved the directivity of the exciter as a function of its overall height. The proposed antenna structure with a 1 overall height of MDAS was fabricated to operate at 2.44 GHz. Highly symmetric bidirectional beams in both E- and H-planes with maximum gains of 10.15 dBi were obtained by the MDAS antenna while the stacked-microstrip dipole exciter inherently has 6.28 dBi maximum gain. Besides the experiments on various MDAS configurations, a directive array structure with rectangular elements called multilayered rectangle array structure was also demonstrated in the paper.