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simulated gain from the full wave analysis and the directivity from integration of the 3D radiation pattern of the simulated antenna with the proposed simplied method are included. The efciency curves in Fig. 6 have been dened as the ratio of the measured antenna gain and the theoretical directivity of a uniform aperture with the size of the antenna prototype. The simulated antenna directivity only reaches the 100% efciency curve at the design frequency (12.1 GHz) due to the serial radial line response [14]. The measured peak gain and efciency values are 28.2 dBi and 70%, both at 12.3 GHz, which increases to 88% if the efciency is dened as the ratio of the measured gain and directivity [8]. Without the presented compensation method a 0.9 dB average gain reduction and a 50% peak efciency has been computed. The previously analyzed coupling effects cause the difference between simulated (from simplied method) and measured directivity, as well as the 0.2 GHz displacement to upper frequencies, which are well predicted in the full wave gain simulation. The peak measured value of the reection coefcient [Fig. 6(b)] in the DBS band is 019 dB, with a bandwidth of 12.7% (VSWR 2:1). The frequency displacement of the simplied simulation has been compensated with an optimization of the coaxial to waveguide transition of the input antenna port, which can only be implemented in the full wave package. V. CONCLUSION A high gain LP RLPA with a simple design method has been presented. Internal rectangular coupling patches have been used to couple the travelling wave inside the radial waveguide to the radiating elements. A compensation method has been applied to reduce the reections inside the waveguide. Likewise, external microstrip phase compensation lines have been used to favor a free placement of the radiating elements. Therefore, the typical problem of grating lobe appearance in this kind of antennas has been avoided. The measured results in an antenna prototype are in reasonable concordance with simulations. Nevertheless, as full wave analysis demonstrates, mutual coupling effects must be considered in the simplied design method in future project iterations, as well as improvements in the manufacturing process of metallic holes over PTFE substrates.

[9] L. Pazin and Y. Leviatan, Uniform amplitude excitation of radiating elements in array antenna pin-fed from radial waveguide, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. Microw. Antennas Propag., vol. 148, no. 6, pp. 413417, Dec. 2001. [10] Design of a radial waveguide feed network for a pin-fed array antenna, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. Microw. Antennas Propag., vol. 153, no. 1, pp. 3842, Feb. 2006. [11] H. Miyashita and T. Katagi, Radial line planar monopulse antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 44, no. 8, pp. 11581165, Aug. 1996. [12] J. L. Masa-Campos and M. Sierra Prez, Radial line planar antenna with microstrip-feed coupling lines, Microwave Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 305311, Aug. 2005. [13] J. L. Masa-Campos, S. Klinger, and M. Sierra- Prez, Parallel plate patch antenna with internal rectangular coupling patches and TE mode excitation, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, no. 7, pp. 21852189, Jul. 2009. [14] L. Pazin and Y. Leviatan, Effect of amplitude tapering and frequencydependent phase errors on radiation characteristics of radial waveguide fed non-resonant array antenna, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. Microw. Antennas Propag., vol. 151, no. 4, pp. 363369, Aug. 2004. [15] L. Pazin and Y. Leviatan, Sidelobes due to periodic amplitude and phase errors in the aperture eld of a radial waveguide pin-fed array antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 5964, Jan. 2007.

A Novel Unidirectional Dual-Band Circularly-Polarized Patch Antenna

Can-Hui Chen and E. K. N. Yung

REFERENCES
[1] F. J. Goebels and K. C. Nelly, Arbitrarily polarized planar antennas, in IRE. Int. Convention Record, Mar. 1959, vol. 7, pp. 119127. [2] M. Ando, K. Sakurai, N. Goto, K. Arimura, and Y. Ito, A radial line slot antenna for 12 GHz satellite TV reception, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 33, no. 12, pp. 13471353, Dec. 1985. [3] M. Takahashi, J.-I. Takada, M. Ando, and N. Goto, A slot design for uniform aperture eld distribution in single-layered radial line slot antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 39, no. 7, pp. 954959, Jul. 1991. [4] K. R. Carver, A cavity-fed concentric ring phased array of helices for use in radio astronomy, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Ohio, Graduate School, OH, 1967. [5] H. Nakano, H. Takeda, Y. Kitamura, H. Mimaki, and J. Yamauchi, Low-prole helical array antenna fed from a radial waveguide, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 279284, Mar. 1992. [6] H. Nakano, S. Okuzama, K. Ohishi, H. Mimaki, and J. Yamauchi, A curl antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 41, no. 11, pp. 1570575, Nov. 1993. [7] M. Haneishi and S. Saito, Radiation properties of microstrip array antenna fed by radial line, in Antennas Propag. Society Int. Symp. Digest, 1991, pp. 588591. [8] R. Shavit, L. Pazin, Y. Israeli, M. Sigalov, and Y. Leviatan, Dual frequency and dual circular polarization microstrip nonresonant array pin-fed from a radial line, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 12, pp. 38973905, Dec. 2005.

AbstractA novel unidirectional dual-band circularly -polarized (CP) patch antenna is proposed in this communication. By loading a pair of L-shaped stubs outside the truncated patch, an outer mode and an inner mode are excited respectively. Therefore, dual-band CP operations are generated. The dual CP bandwidths are 3% and 4%. Because the meandering probe feed technique is used, the proposed antenna enjoys the wide impedance bandwidths of 8% for the lower band and 19% for the upper band. The peak gains within the dual bands are 9 dBic and 8.2 dBic and its height is 0 086 . Besides, the front-to-back ratios are about 20 dB. Index TermsCircular polarization, dual-band, patch antenna, unidirectional antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION Circularly polarized antenna is well-known for its feature of relative insensitivity to transmitter and receiver orientations. CP radiation is generated when two degenerate orthogonal linearly polarized modes, of equal amplitude and 90 phase difference, are independently excited. Patch antenna is one attractive candidate for producing circular polarization owning to its characteristics of wide bandwidth, high
Manuscript received August 30, 2010; revised December 02, 2010; accepted December 11, 2010. Date of publication June 09, 2011; date of current version August 03, 2011. The authors are with Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China (e-mail: cchen0@student. cityu.edu.hk). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this communication are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2158961

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gain, low prole and low cost. For a single feed patch antenna, truncating a pair of corners and cutting a diagonal slot [1] are two conventional ways to generate CP radiation. However, narrow axial ratio bandwidths of less than 1% are normally obtained. To enhance the CP bandwidth, some techniques, such as a probe-fed corner-truncated patch with an L-shaped ground plane [2], a meandering probe truncated corners stacked patch antenna [3], and an L-shaped probe-fed patch antenna with a cross slot [4] were proposed respectively. The rapid development of wireless communication technology has stimulated a growing interest in dual-band CP antenna. Various types of dual-band CP antenna have been proposed in recent years. For example, a microstrip-line fed, annular ring slot antenna with four unequal linear slots [5] can produce dual-band dual-sense CP waves. However, its radiation pattern is bi-directional; therefore its gain is not very high (i.e., 6.3 dBic). Loading an unequal lateral cross-slot in the ground plane can excite dual-band single-sense CP radiations for the annular-ring patch antenna [6]. Unfortunately, loading the cross-slot may introduce considerable backward radiation, which makes the radiation pattern nearly bi-directional. An S-shaped slotted patch antenna [7] was proposed to achieve dual-band CP operations. Due to cutting a slot in the ground plane, poor front-to-back (F/B) ratio is caused. From above three antennas, we can nd that cutting a slot in the ground plane is not a sensible approach for achieving a unidirectional radiation pattern. To reduce the backward radiation, a metal plate reector is incorporated into the slot antenna in [8], [9]. But this technique comes at the expense of increasing the height noticeably, at least 0:18 increment. To achieve unidirectional dual-band CP operations, a spiral antenna loaded with a helix was proposed in [10], however, this antenna needs the external matching network. By embedding two pairs of arc-shaped slots and protruding one of the longer slots with a narrow slot, two near-degenerate orthogonal resonant modes are excited [11]. As a result, dual-band CP operations can be obtained. However, its dual CP bandwidths are about 1%. A square microstrip antenna can achieve dual-band CP radiations with four T-shaped slits at the edges or four Y-shaped slits at the corners [12], since the perturbed TM01 and TM03 modes are generated. However, its frequency ratio is larger than 1.76 because of its inherent TM01 and TM03 modes. In addition, its CP bandwidths are also about 1% and its gains are not larger than 4 dBic. Through connecting an L-shaped strip to two orthogonal sides of the inner boundary of the annular-ring patch, dual-band CP radiation can also be realized [13]. But this design has the drawbacks of small CP bandwidths, large frequency ratio and its frequency ratio lacks adjustability. Embedding four circular holes in the patch can achieve dual-band CP operations with a small frequency ratio [14]. Unfortunately, this antenna needs an external impedance transformer and its frequency ratio lacks adjustability since the impedance and axial ratio characteristics cannot be tuned separately. Recently, a unidirectional dual-band CP antenna consisting of a zonal slot and an annular slot [15] has been proposed. The zonal and the annular slots control the lower and upper bands respectively. However, its gains are not very high, 5.59 dBic for the lower band and 3 dBic for the upper band. Moreover, the antenna height reaches 0:175 of its lower band. In this communication, we propose a novel unidirectional dual-band circularly polarized patch antenna with a low prole and a relative high gain. Because of the wideband characteristic of the meandering probe feed technique [16] and the simple structure of the truncated corners, we choose the truncated meandering probe-fed patch antenna as our antenna design prototype. By loading a pair of L-shaped stubs outside the truncated patch, an additional inner mode is excited. The inner mode, together with the originally existed outer mode, produces dual-band CP operations. By adjusting the length of the stubs, we can adjust the frequency ratio of the dual bands. Furthermore, a front-to-back ratio of 19.8 dB can be obtained within the dual operational bands.

Fig. 1. Antenna Geometry of the proposed antenna (unit in mm).

II. ANTENNA STRUCTURE AND DESIGN Fig. 1 shows the conguration of the proposed antenna. The patch is a square copper plate with a pair of opposite corners trimmed in the 45 direction. One L-shaped stub is connected with upper right edge while the other is connected with the left edge. Their widths are 1 mm. The patch is supported by four plastic posts. The meandering probe has one end connected to the patch and the other end connected to coaxial cable. The width of the probe is 10 mm. The thicknesses of the patch and the meandering probe are 0.3 mm. The ground plane is an aluminum rectangular plate with the size of 230 3 210 mm2 (1:16 2 1:06 of the lower band). The height of the antenna (H) is equal to 17 mm (0:086). The antenna is located at the center of ground. Other parameters can be found in Fig. 1. Here, the outer mode means the currents ow along the peripheral path while the inner mode means the currents ow along the inner diagonal triangle path. From the lower left part of Fig. 1, we can see that two L-shaped stubs and the patch create the outer mode while the upper right stub and inner diagonal triangle create the inner mode. Their total lengths determine their CP center frequencies respectively, which will be discussed extensively in the later section. The pair truncated corners act as the perturbed elements of the lower band and the right L stub acts as the perturbed element of the upper band. The function of the right L stub is similar to that of the tuning stub for the equilateral-triangular microstrip patch antenna [17]. In [17], the tuning stub can excite two orthogonal near-degenerate modes for CP radiation. The left L stub functions as a tuning unit to achieve the optimum CP performance and the desired frequency ratio. Compared with digging slots, loading stubs has the advantage of easily adjusting the length to compensate the possible fabrication errors and substrate materials tolerances [17]. Instead of using the simple L-probe feeding [4], the meandering probe feeding is adopted because it can provide wide enough impedance bandwidths to cover the dual CP bands.

III. NUMERICAL ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION In order to investigate the effects of various parameters on the antenna performance, parametric studies have been carried out using the commercial software IE3D [18]. Through out the studies in this section, all other parameters remain the same as those in Fig. 1 unless stated otherwise.

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Fig. 2. Effect of the gap on the performance of the proposed antenna.

Fig. 4. Effect of the length L1 on the proposed antenna performance.

Fig. 3. Effect of the antenna height on the performance of proposed antenna.

Fig. 5. Effect of the length L2 on the proposed antenna performance.

1 75 mm

After extensively research on the truncated patch CP antenna [1][3], it is interesting to nd that the circumferences of their patches are approximately 1.5 times of the wavelength of the CP center frequencies. Fig. 2 shows the effect of the upper gap of the meandering probe (G) on the antenna performance. It is found that either increasing or reducing the gap signicantly deteriorates impedance performance for both bands, especially for the lower band. Slightly change of 1 mm would cause a big difference. On the other hand, the CP characteristic is not so sensitive to the changing of the gap. It indicates that once the CP band is tuned, we can change the gap to adapt the impedance band with CP band. The feature can facilitate the tuning of the antenna. Fig. 3 illustrates the effect of the antenna height H on performance of the proposed antenna. Noticed the sensitivity of impedance to the gap, here we change the height without changing the gap (i.e. ). We can see that reducing the height makes upper band re: ection coefcient become smaller and the bandwidth become wider. On the contrary, increasing the height conduces to the pass-through of the lower band. Similarly to [16], increasing the height also reduces the lower band frequency, due to the increase of fringing eld effect. The CP characteristic is less affected by the change of the height. It is seen that only the upper band frequency will shift higher as the height is decreasing. This is because the wavelength of the upper band is shorter than that of the lower band. Therefore, the upper band reacts more sensitively to the slight change of H than the lower band. The effect of length L1 on the antenna performance is depicted in Fig. 4. It can be observed that both CP bands will shift to lower frequency as L1 increases from 23.2 mm to 32.6 mm. However, the lower

G=

CP band disappears when L1 increases to 32.6 mm. In addition, an extra LHCP band located at 2.08 GHz is introduced when L1 is equal to 23.2 mm. Unfortunately, the radiation pattern is not broadside mode and its  . For its impedance charactermaximum value is achieved at  istic, the lower band will shift to lower frequency while the upper band will shift to higher frequency when L1 is increasing. Furthermore, the lower band tends to split into dual bands as L1 decreases. The inuence of the variation of L2 on the antenna performance is shown in Fig. 5. When L2 increases from 26.3 mm to 32.3 mm, the center frequency of the upper CP remains unchanged while lower CP band decreases from 1.55 GHz to 1.45 GHz. The impedance variation trend of L2 is opposite of that of L1. Increasing L2 makes the lower impedance shift upward and the upper impedance band shift downward. Moreover, increasing L2 conduces to the pass-through of the upper band. Their opposite variation trends are attributed to their different current distributions. The currents through the junction of L1 are in different directions while the currents through the junction of L2 are in the same direction. From the analysis of L1 and L2, we can see that changing of L1 would change the center frequencies of both CP bands while changing of L2 affects the center frequency of the lower band. In this connection, L1 and L2 contribute to the lower CP band while L1 mainly contributes to the upper CP band. Fig. 6 shows the effect of the top right and the top left stubs positions on the CP performance. Here we change the stubs positions through moving the stubs along the edges and keeping their lengths unchanged. The values in the brackets are the relative changes to reference antenna in Fig. 1. Positive value means moving upward along the edge and

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Fig. 6. Effect of top right and top left stubs positions on the axial ratio characteristic.

Fig. 8. Simulated CP frequency ratio ranges (Ant1: L1 = W = 7, L2 = 34:3, P2 = 19; Ant2: L1 = 36:4, D1 L2 = P2 = C2 = 0 Ant3: L1 = L2 = C1 = C2 = 0).

21:4, P1 = 9:9, = 5:6, W = 7,

of wavelength at 1.51 GHz of the lower CP band. The total length of the inner mode is 194.2 mm, about 1.52 times of the wavelength at 2.35 GHz. For the latter case, the total outer mode length is 315.7 mm, which is 1.57 times of the wavelength at 1.495 GHz. And the total inner mode length is 208.8 mm, approximately 1:566 at 2.35 GHz. The above analysis shows that the circular polarization principle of the proposed antenna is identical to that of conventional truncated patch antennas [1][3]. Based on the above discussion, an empirical formula of frequency ratio (FR) is derived to facilitate to redesign the antenna p 4L + (2 2 0 4)d + L1 + C 1 + L2 + C 2 p FR = (1) : (2 + 2)(L 0 d) + L1 + C 1 + P 1
Fig. 7. Effect of adding a third stub on the axial ratio characteristic.

negative value means moving downward along the edge. It can be seen that moving upward top right stub by 4 mm lowers the upper CP band center frequency while moving downward 4 mm makes the upper band shift higher. For the lower band, the changes are relatively slight. Fig. 6 also shows the effect of the top left stubs position on the axial ratio characteristic. Unlike the right stub, changing the position of the top left stub has little inuence on the center frequencies of both CP bands. The results are in reasonable agreement with previous conclusion that L1 and L2 contribute to the lower CP band while L1 mainly contributes to the upper CP band. Since moving upward of top right stub lowers the upper band frequency, we infer that lower right triangle and the top right stub consist of the inner mode while the two stubs and the whole patch consist of the outer mode, as seen in Fig. 1. To verify this inference, we introduce a third stub to test the axial ratio response of the antenna. The stub is a straight line with the size of 14:6 3 1 mm2 . It will be placed on the top left or the bottom right corners respectively, as illustrated in Fig. 7. From the obtained result, it is observed that, for the lower band, introducing the stub lowers the frequency for both cases, since both of them increase the total length of the outer mode. However, adding the stub at the top left corner has little inuence on the upper band. Its axial ratio characteristic is almost the same as that of without the straight stub. Meanwhile, this exercise on the bottom right corner lowers the upper band center frequency to 2.25 GHz. The result agrees very well with the inference. With this inference, we further analyze the antennas without the stub and with bottom right stub in terms of wavelength. For the former case, the total length of the outer mode is 301.1 mm, which is the 1.52 times

The antenna designing procedure can be summarized as: 1) Determine the optimum L and H according to the rules in [16] at the middle frequency (1.94 GHz in this communication) of the desired dual center frequencies of the CP bands. 2) Select the optimum d, its choosing range should be 0.29 L  0.42 L. 3) Choose suitable L1, C1, L2 and C2 based on (1) to meet the desired frequency ratio. 4) Fine tune P1 and P2 to get the optimum CP performance. 5) Change the meandering probe to adapt the impedance bands with the CP bands. Fig. 8 shows the maximum and minimum frequency ratios which can be obtained. According to (1), by reducing L1 and increasing L2, we can achieve the maximum FR of 1.77 (2.58 GHz/1.46 GHz). Conversely, by increasing L1 and reducing L2, we can achieve the minimum FR of 1.45 (2.2 GHz/1.52 GHz). Note that using overlong L1 and L2 will deteriorate the antenna performance. The obtained result shows that the frequency ratio of the proposed antenna is quite exible. IV. MEASURED RESULTS In order to verify the simulated results, a patch antenna based on the parameters shown in Fig. 1 was nally fabricated and measured. An Agilent E5071C network analyzer and SATIMO 3D measurement system [19] were used to measure the reection coefcient and the radiation pattern. Fig. 9 shows the measured and simulated reection coefcients of the proposed antenna. The fabricated antenna is presented in the inset. The measured results are in reasonable agreement with the simulated results. The discrepancy between them can be mainly attributed to fabrication errors, especially to the gap error. The measured bandwidths are 8% (from 1.43 GHz  1.55 GHz, 1.49 GHz) for the

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Fig. 9. Measured and simulated reection coefcients versus frequency.

Fig. 11. Measured and simulated axial ratios and gains of the upper band.

Fig. 12. Measured and simulated radiation patterns at 1.51 GHz.

Fig. 10. Measured and simulated axial ratios and gains of the lower band.

lower band and 19% (from 2.09 GHz  2.53 GHz, 2.31 GHz) for the upper band. And the simulated bandwidths are 12% (from 1.42 GHz  1.6 GHz, 1.51 GHz) and 18% (from 2.14 GHz  2.56 GHz, 2.35 GHz) respectively. Fig. 10 shows the measured and simulated axial ratios, gains and the antenna efciencies of the lower band. The measured results agree well with the simulated results. The measured CP bandwidth is 3% (from 1.49 GHz  1.53 GHz, 1.51 GHz). The lowest axial ratio is 1 dB at 1.51 GHz. The simulated CP bandwidth is 3% (from 1.49 GHz  1.54 GHz, 1.515 GHz). The measurement error is 0.3%. The gain is dened to the isotropic circularly polarized antenna. The measured gain is between 8 dBic cto 9 dBic within the operational CP bandwidth with the peak gain of 9 dBic at 1.51 GHz, while the simulated gain ranges from 8.0 dBic to 8.5 dBic. Fig. 11 illustrates the measured and simulated axial ratios, gains and antenna efciencies of the upper band. It can be observed that the measured CP bandwidth is 4% (from 2.34 GHz  2.43 GHz, 2.385 GHz) against simulated CP bandwidth of 4% (from 2.32 GHz  2.42 GHz, 2.37 GHz). The measurement error is 0.6%. The measured CP frequency ratio is 1.58 (2.385 GHz/1.51 GHz). From Fig. 8, we can observe that the antenna without two stubs has the single 3-dB CP bandwidth of 0.15 GHz (from 1.92  2.07 GHz). Coincidentally, the total simulated dual CP bandwidth is also 0.15 GHz (0.05 + 0.1 GHz). Hence, loading L1 and L2 is a measure of relocating the CP band frequency, without reducing or increasing the CP bandwidth. Furthermore, the dual impedance bands can cover their respective CP bands. Within the upper operational CP band, the measured gain remains at

Fig. 13. Measured and simulated radiation patterns at 2.37 GHz.

a stable value of 8 dBic while the simulated gain keeps at 8.5 dBic. The differences between them may be attributed to the polarization mismatch of transmitter antenna in the measurement system. From the analysis of previous sections, the currents ow along the peripheral path in the lower band while they ow along the inner diagonal triangle path in the upper band. Therefore the effective antenna size of the upper band is smaller than that of the lower band, which results in the similar gains in both bands in spite of a larger electrical size in the upper band. The measured peak gain is 8.2 dBic. The gains in both bands are higher than those in [15], while the proposed antenna has a much lower prole. The measured and simulated antenna efciencies within the dual CP bands are between 88% and 97%. The radiation patterns in the ' = 0 and ' = 90 planes at 1.51 GHz and 2.37 GHz were simulated and measured and the obtained results are plotted in Figs. 12 and Fig. 13 respectively. Table I shows the summarized radiation pattern characteristics. It is found that the radiation patterns of the

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TABLE I COMPARISON OF THE MEASURED AND SIMULATED RADIATION PATTERN CHARACTERISTICS

proposed antenna can maintain good symmetrical characteristic. The symmetrical radiation pattern is highly desired because the maximum direction would not shift at different frequencies. The 3-dB beamwidths at both planes are around 66 at 1.51 GHz. The co-polarizations are at least 17 dB larger than the cross-polarizations in the bore sight direction at the dual frequencies. Besides, the F/B ratios range from 19.8 dB to 21.8 dB. Larger F/B ratios indicate the backward radiations are very small, which are preferred by the unidirectional antenna. V. CONCLUSION A novel unidirectional dual-band CP patch antenna has been presented. The dual-band CP operations are achieved by loading a pair of L-shaped stubs outside the truncated patch. Since the meandering probe feed technique is adopted, the proposed antenna inherits the wide impedance bandwidth characteristic. The measured 3-dB CP bandwidths are 3% and 4%, while the measured impedance bandwidths are 8% for the lower band and 19% for the upper band. Its peak gains are 9 dBic and 8.2 dBic for the dual bands with a low prole of 0:086. In addition, the antenna enjoys the favorable characteristics of symmetrical radiation patterns and large front-to-back ratios.

[12] K. P. Yang and K. L. Wong, Dual-band circularly-polarized square microstrip antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 377382, Mar. 2001. [13] J. S. Row, Dual-frequency circularly polarised annular-ring microstrip antenna, Electron. Lett., vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 153154, 2004. [14] Y. J. Sung and Y. S. Kim, Circular polarised microstrip patch antennas for broadband and dual-band operation, Electron. Lett., vol. 40, no. 9, pp. 520522, 2004. [15] Y. Ding and K. W. Leung, Dual-band circularly polarized dual-slot antenna with a dielectric cover, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, no. 12, pp. 37573764, Dec. 2009. [16] H. W. Lai and K. M. Lu, Design and study of wide-band patch antenna fed by meandering probe, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 564571, Feb. 2006. [17] J. H. Lu and K. L. Wong, Single-feed circularly polarized equilateral-triangular microstrip antenna with a tuning stub, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 48, no. 12, pp. 18691872, Dec. 2000. [18] IE3D 12.0 Manual, Zeland Software, Inc. [19] Starlab User Guide 1.0, Version d, SATIMO Corporations, 2008.

REFERENCES
[1] P. C. Sharma and K. C. Gupta, Analysis and optimized design of single feed circularly polarized microstrip antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 949955, Nov. 1983. [2] F. S. Chang, K. L. Wong, and T. W. Chiou, Low-cost broadband circularly polarized patch antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 51, no. 10, pp. 30063009, Oct. 2003. [3] H. W. Lai and K. M. Luk, Meandering probe fed patch antenna with high gain characteristic for circularly polarized application, Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 10951098, May 2007. [4] W. K. Lo, J.-L. Hu, C. H. Chan, and K. M. Luk, L-shaped probefeed circularly polarized microstrip patch antenna with a cross slot, Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 251253, May 2000. [5] X. L. Bao and M. J. Ammann, Dual-frequency dual-sense circularly polarized slot antenna fed by microstrip line, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 645649, Mar. 2008. [6] X. L. Bao and M. J. Ammann, Dual-frequency circularly-polarized patch antenna with compact size and small frequency ratio, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 21042107, Jul. 2007. [7] Nasimuddin, Z. N. Chen, and X. M. Qing, Dual-band circularly polarized S-shaped slotted patch antenna with a small frequency-ratio, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 21122115, Jun. 2010. [8] T. Y. Han, Y. Y. Chu, L. Y. Tseng, and J. S. Row, Unidirectional circularly-polarized slot antennas with broadband operation, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 6, pp. 17771780, Jun. 2008. [9] S. L. Steven Yang, A. A. Kishk, and K. F. Lee, Wideband circularly polarized antenna with L-shaped slot, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 6, pp. 17801783, Jun. 2008. [10] C. H. Chen, E. K. N. Yung, and B. J. Hu, Spiral antenna with helix loaded for dual circularly polarized bands radiation, Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 49, no. 8, pp. 19391942, Aug. 2007. [11] G. B. Hsieh, M. H. Chen, and K. L. Wong, Single-feed dual-band circularly polarised microstrip antenna, Electron. Lett., vol. 34, no. 12, pp. 11701171, Jun. 1998.

Circularly Polarized Antenna Having Two Linked Slot-Rings

The-Nan Chang and Jyun-Ming Lin

AbstractA broadband circularly polarized slot-ring type antenna is presented. Two square slot-rings are linked over the corner. By tuning the size of the slot-rings, both the return-loss and the axial-ratio bandwidths can be enhanced. The bandwidth is enhanced by merging the rst and second bands. The rst band is due to the individual loop whereas the second band is introduced by the linked structure. The structure can also be viewed as a combination of two perturbed square rings. The perturbation causes the generation of a circularly polarized wave. The measured 3 dB axial-ratio bandwidth is 1.05 GHz centered at 3.1 GHz. Index TermsBroadband antennas, slot antennas.

I. INTRODUCTION The circularly polarized (CP) antenna has often been used in mobile communications. The microstrip antenna can be employed when the bandwidth requirement is low while the slot-ring antenna may be more suitable for operating a wide bandwidth,. Slot-ring antenna can be considered to be dual to the microstrip antenna. Though
Manuscript received June 20, 2010; revised January 06, 2011; accepted January 06, 2011. Date of publication June 09, 2011; date of current version August 03, 2011. T.-N. Chang is with the Tatung University, Electrical Engineering, Taipei 104, Taiwan (e-mail: tnchang@ttu.edu.tw). J.-M. Lin is at Taipei City 104, Taiwan. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2158956

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