Circularly Polarized Printed Antenna Combining Slots and Patch

In this paper, the authors propose a circularly polarized printed antenna combining a slot array antenna and a patch antenna, with dual-band operation. The proposed antenna has good isolation performance, is compact, and has simple configuration. This antenna is composed of two parts, a patch antenna (for Rx) on the top, and a slot array antenna (for Tx) on the bottom, respectively. The element layout is such that the lower radiation element is not hidden by the upper one for wide observation angle. Hence, both radiation elements can naturally radiate the targeted polarization. Both slot array and patch antenna are fed by electromagnetically coupled microstrip line feed. With such a configuration, it is possible to efficiently obtain good isolation characteristics for both frequency bands. Furthermore, this antenna can be easily composed and it is not necessary to use any feeding pin or via hole. The target of this antenna is mobile communications applications such as mobile satellite communications, base-station of wireless LAN, etc. Here, the design techniques are discussed and the numerical and experimental analyses are presented. key words: dual-band, patch antenna, slot antenna, circular polarization, electromagnetically coupled microstrip line feed