Single-Feed Dual-Polarized High Gain Microstrip Antenna

In this work, a novel single-feed stacked microstrip antenna is proposed for high gain and dual polarization application. The designed antenna is useful at two purposes. In one hand, its lower operating frequency demonstrates high gain and on the other hand, the upper operating frequency shows circular polarization. The proposed design consists of two pairs of small parallel slots on the radiating surface as well as in the ground plane with a view to achieving significant amount of gain (approximately 8.3 dB) at its lower operating frequency (6 GHz). An interesting aspect of this work is its polarization diversity. The designed antenna is capable of showing circular polarization at its upper operating frequency (6.8 GHz). At this frequency, the axial ratio of the antenna has been kept below 3 dB for circular polarization applications. This circular polarization has been introduced by truncating the corners of radiating patch at different shapes. High gain and dual polarization play a major role on different antenna performance parameters. This antenna meets these two applications simultaneously. A prototype has been fabricated and characterized in order to validate the results. An outstanding agreement between experimental results and simulated results is achieved.