Micromachines (Apr 2023)

Low-Profile and Wider-Angle Beam Tilting Parasitic Array Resonator Antenna with Optimized Deflected Ground Plane on FR-4 Substrate

  • Nur Ain Fatihah Mohd Zainudin,
  • Mohamed Nasrun Osman,
  • Thennarasan Sabapathy,
  • Muzammil Jusoh,
  • Mohd Najib Mohd Yasin,
  • Mohamad Kamal A. Rahim

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/mi14040834
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 4
p. 834

Abstract

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A low-profile and wide-angle radiation pattern reconfigurable antenna is designed, analyzed, and fabricated for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, which operate at a 2.5-GHz frequency. This work aims to minimize the number of switches and optimize the parasitic size and ground plane to achieve a steering angle of more than 30° using a low cost-high loss FR-4 substrate. The radiation pattern reconfigurability is achieved by introducing four parasitic elements surrounding a driven element. In this work, the single driven element is fed by a coaxial feed, while other parasitic elements are integrated with the RF switches on the FR-4 as the substrate with dimensions of 150 × 100 mm (1.67 × 2.5 λo). The RF switches of the parasitic elements are surface mounted on the substrate. By truncating and modifying the ground plane, the beam steering can be achieved at more than 30° on the xz plane. Additionally, the proposed antenna can attain an average tilt angle of more than 10° on the yz plane. The antenna is also capable of attaining other important results, such as a fractional bandwidth of 4% at 2.5 GHz and an average gain of 2.3 dBi for all configurations. By adopting the ON/OFF condition on the embedded RF switches, the beam steering can be controlled at a certain angle, thus increasing the tilting angle of the wireless sensor networks. With such a good performance, the proposed antenna has high potential to serve as a base station in WSN applications.

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