The dual-polarized staggered stacked patches antenna

Abstract

A new dual-polarized staggered and stacked patches antenna with wide impedance bandwidth and high isolation is proposed. The antenna consists of two groups of radiation patches, in 7 layers, and uses the orthogonal adjacent coupling structure on staggered layer to excite a pair of linear polarization modes. Thanks to the staggered feeder mode, it has increased the isolation performance between ports and compressed the transverse size of the antenna. As a result of the combination of staggered stack-up between the patches and the stepped gradient shape of the main radiating patches, it has effectively expanded the impedance bandwidth of the antenna. The proposed antenna is simulated, fabricated and measured. The staggered feeding structure effectively reduces the cross-sectional area of the antenna, and greatly improves the isolation between feeding ports. The measurement results show that the impedance bandwidths for vertical and horizontal polarization modes are 40.2% (638–960 MHz) and 40.0% (645968 MHz) respectively when the return loss is lower than −10 dB, and the isolation between feeding ports is better than −30 dB. Meanwhile, the antenna has a stable and symmetrical radiation pattern across the working band, therefore making it suitable to be used as antenna and antenna array element of mobile wireless communication base stations.