A novel wideband and circularly polarized cross-dipole antenna

In this paper, we present a novel wideband circularly polarized (CP) composite, called cavity-backed crossed dipole antenna for 2.45 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band wireless communication. To excite the CP radiation effectively, a curved-delay line providing an orthogonal phase difference among the cross-dipole elements is attached at corners of the sequentially rotated elements. By choosing a proper radius of the curved-delay line, a wide input impedance of the antenna can be realized. Unlike conventional cross-dipole antennas, the proposed cross-dipole antenna is designed with an open stub added to the radiating arms of the dipole so that both impedance and axial ratio bandwidths are enhanced. The antenna is center-fed by a 50-Omega coaxial cable and is placed above a cavity-backed reflector to obtain a directional CP radiation pattern. With the advantage of being center-fed, a symmetric CP radiation pattern can be achieved across the entire operating bandwidth. To further improve the directivity and the radiation pattern, a rectangular cavity-backed reflector is used. Simulated and measured results confirm that the proposed antenna has good CP characteristics. The proposed antenna obtains a broad 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth of 49% (1.20 GHz, 1.96-3.16 GHz) and an impedance bandwidth of 67.7% (1.66 GHz, 1.69-3.35 GHz) for reflection coefficient (S-11) <= -10 dB. It also yields an average CP gain of 9.2 dBic across the operating bandwidth and a peak CP gain of 10 dBic. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.