A Modified-square Slot Antenna with Circular Polarization Characteristics for Military Band Applications

Abstract

In this work, the design and performance of a circularly polarized (CP) antenna designed using characteristic modal analysis (CMA) for military band application is presented. The substrate used is single-sided glass-reinforced epoxy and the antenna dimensions are 37×37×1.6 mm 3 . The antenna is compact, low-profile, circular polarized having an ARBW of around 500 MHz (center frequency 4.6 GHz). A coplanar waveguide (CPW) fed monopole antenna is used for excitation of the modified-square slot antenna that incorporates quarter section of circular symmetrical patches on the four corners. A stub orthogonal to the CPW fed monopole capacitively tunes the low Q mode as identified by CMA technique to shift to a lower frequency to create degenerate modes in military band for circular polarization generation. The 3-dB AR bandwidth of the antenna is in the frequency range 4.43- 4.9 GHz and measured value of impedance bandwidth is 3.33 GHz. The fractional ARBW and impedance BW are 10.07 % and 61.6 % respectively. The peak antenna gain in the CP frequency band is 3.75 dBic. The proposed antenna exhibits good polarization purity, the minimum axial ratio is 1.38 at 4.6 GHz. The broad circular polarized antenna is suited for military applications covering the frequency range 4.43-4.9 GHz.