Wideband Dual-Circular-Polarization Antenna With High Isolation for Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communications

Abstract

This article presents a wideband dual-circular-polarization (dual-CP) antenna with high port isolation based on a grooved-wall CP horn combined with an orthomode transducer (OMT) in the W-band. A pair of grooves on the inner wall of the horn serves as an inbuilt polarizer within the horn antenna, which is capable of generating both left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) and right-hand circular polarization (RHCP) without any septum. The continuous linearly tapered groove design also allows this multisection grooved-wall CP horn to achieve low reflection coefficients over a wide bandwidth, thereby realizing wideband dual-CP with high port isolation when it is used together with a wideband OMT. A prototype of the proposed dual-CP antenna is designed in simulation and measured in an experiment. The simulated and measured results agree very well, showing that port isolation >32.5 dB over 31.6% bandwidth from 80 to 110 GHz is achieved with axial ratio (AR) < 2.8 dB and reflection coefficient <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&lt; -20$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB for both LHCP and RHCP. Rotationally symmetric radiation patterns over the entire operating bandwidth are also observed with a measured gain of 19.6 ± 2 dBic.