Achieving Wider Bandwidth With Full-Wavelength Dipoles for 5G Base Stations

A new method of designing full-wavelength dipoles (FWDs) is presented. A dual-polarized antenna is built based on FWDs for base station applications as an example. The antenna has four FWDs arranged in a square loop array form. The employed FWDs are bent upward to maintain a small aperture size, so that the realized element still fits in traditional base station antenna (BSA) array. The antenna is first matched across the band from 1.63 to 3.71 GHz, which can cover both the LTE band from 1.7 to 2.7 GHz and the 5G (sub-6 GHz) band from 3.3 to 3.6 GHz simultaneously. Then, band-stop filters are inserted in the feed networks of the antenna to suppress the radiation between 2.7 to 3.3 GHz. The antenna is fabricated and tested. Experimental results validate the simulation results. Comparing with the previously available FWD that has a bandwidth of 32%, the FWD proposed in this article exhibits a much wider bandwidth of 78%. Moreover, this bandwidth is also comparable to and wider than those of the state-of-the-art BSAs based on half-wavelength dipoles (HWDs). The bandwidth enhancement and footprint reduction of the FWD in this article demonstrate a high potential of FWDs to be used in other applications.