A Simple Design of Polarization Reconfigurable Fabry-Perot Resonator Antenna

Abstract

This paper presents a simple design of high gain Fabry-Perot (FP) antenna with polarization diversity. The proposed antenna is composed of a reconfigurable microstrip patch, a partially reflective surface, and a planar metallic reflector. By electrically controlling the ON/OFF states of two p-i-n diodes, the polarization of the antenna can be switched among dual-sense circular polarization and single linear polarization. Notably, the biasing wires, which are generally used in designing reconfigurable antennas, are not necessary in the proposed design. Thus, the undesirable effects of the biasing wires on the antenna's operating characteristics can be eliminated. An antenna prototype, whose overall dimensions are 2.0\lambda \times 2.0\lambda \times 0.6\lambda at the center operating frequency, is fabricated and measured to validate the design concept. The measured overlapped bandwidth for -10 dB \vert \text{S}_{11}\vert and 3-dB AR bandwidths of all polarization states is 4% (7.3-7.6 GHz). The desired radiation patterns are also observed with a peak gain of 15.1 dBi.