Method to Enhance Directional Propagation of Circularly Polarized Antennas by Making Near-Electric Field Phase More Uniform

Abstract

A new approach to significantly increase the uniformity in aperture phase distribution, through time synchronization in the near-electric field, of circularly polarized (CP) antennas is presented. The method uses the phase of the CP electric field vectors, obtained through full-wave numerical simulations, and does not rely on any approximation such as ray tracing. The near-field data is post-processed to extract the relative phase difference that exists due to the unsynchronized rotations of the electric field vectors in a plane parallel to the antenna aperture. The phase delay is compensated with a thin time-synchronizing metasurface (TSM) that has a 2-D array of time-delay cells. The method is demonstrated with a prototype made of a two-port patch antenna, which is fed through a hybrid junction, and a TSM that is placed at one wavelength spacing above the patch. When TSM is used with patch antenna, its uniform phase area increases manifold thus increasing far-field directivity from 6.8 to 22 dBic.