A Left/Right-Handed Dual Circularly-Polarized Antenna with Duplexing and Filtering Performance

Abstract

A shared-radiator dual-band dual-sense circularly-polarized (CP) microstrip antenna with duplexing and filtering functions is presented. For each band, there is a coupling network, which consists of a hairpin resonator, a straight slot, and a U-slot, and thus two paths with an inherent 90° or -90° phase difference are available for the input signal to couple to the patch, left-handed CP (LHCP) characteristic and right-handed CP (RHCP) characteristic are respectively realized at different bands for the proposed antenna with a single patch. Such a dual-band dual-sense CP patch antenna is highly integrated and outperforms other traditional CP antennas state-of-the-art. Moreover, the duplexing and filtering functions are seamlessly integrated into the dual-band patch antenna with a low-profile ( 0.044 λo ), and application of such an integrated device in wireless systems can potentially reduce the volume, complexity, and cost of RF front-ends. Based on resonator-based topologies, the principles of achieving the dual-sense CP, duplexing, and filtering functions are illustrated. As a proof-of-concept, an antenna working at C-band is prototyped and tested. Good agreements between the measured and simulated results are achieved, showing an LHCP radiation characteristic for the low-band operation and a RHCP radiation characteristic for the high-band operation, respectively. The antenna also exhibits very good frequency selectivity and out-of-band rejection performance. At the low-band, the impedance and 3-dB axial-ratio (AR) bandwidths are 4.7% and 1.1%. At the high-band, the impedance and AR bandwidths are about 7.3% and 3.2%. The isolation between the two channels/bands is over 24 dB.