Low-Profile Shared-Structure Dual-Polarized Yagi–Uda Antennas

Abstract

Low-profile shared-structure dual-polarized (DP) Yagi–Uda antennas are proposed, which are formed by three kinds of basic components, namely DP driven element, DP director, and DP reflector. An open-cavity dipole is utilized as the DP driven element to generate DP endfire radiations. The quarter-wave resonance mode for vertical polarization (VP) and half-wave dipole resonance mode for horizontal polarization (HP) are excited by differential feeding structures in the DP driven element. The open-cavity element is adopted as the DP director or reflector to enhance endfire gain. For the proposed design, two polarization radiators are integrated into one structure, realizing structure sharing, and thus a low profile. Three-element (Ant. 1) and seven-element (Ant. 2) antennas with a profile of 0.1 λ₀ are designed, fabricated, and measured. The measured overlapped bandwidth of the Ant. 1 is from 4.11 to 4.83 GHz (16%) with ports isolation higher than 30 dB, and the measured VP and HP gains are from 5 to 6 dBi and 5 to 7 dBi, respectively. The Ant. 2 further increases the DP endfire gain by 2–3 dBi at the overlapped bandwidth of 16.3%.