Low-profile dual-polarized differential-fed filtering antenna and its novel array with low sidelobe level

Abstract

This paper presents a single-layer dual-polarized filtering antenna with good out-of-band suppression. By using inherent characteristic of the patch’s eigenmode and meanwhile merging four filtering strategies, i.e., parasitic patches, slot on the driving patch, and defected groundstructure (DGS), a low-profile filtering antenna design with five radiation nulls has been realized. With the designed filtering antenna, a conventional 1×2 array with a spacing of 0.91λ is first developed. In order to reduce the sidelobe level of the array, a sharing patching scheme is introduced to decrease the interspace between the elements as 0.44λ, with the same physical size as the conventional array. In addition, a concept to measure total isolation between two kinds of the polarized ports in the array, i.e., SddVH, has been derived for the first time. The prototype of the proposed array is fabricated with a profile of 0.038λ. Measured results indicate that the designed novel array has an operational band of 3.53–4.06 GHz, SddVH better than 41 dB, a sidelobe level below −18 dB, and a suppression level above 20 dB with the stopband up to 0.5 GHz and 5 GHz.