Design and implementation of a low profile polarization-reconfigurable transmitarray with linear polarized feed

A novel polarization-reconfigurable transmitarray with linear polarized feed is presented in this letter. Each element in the proposed transmitarray consists of two cascaded cross dipoles to achieve more than 310 degrees of linear phase with transmission magnitude equal to or better than 0.8 dB. The proposed unit cell has a thickness of 0.22(0), which leads to a low profile transmitarray compared with those conventional designs. The element behavior of low transmission loss has resulted in higher antenna efficiency. By properly rotating the feed antenna around the center and selecting the x- and y-dimension of each element, the proposed transmitarray can generate radiation patterns with different polarization states, including left-handed circular polarization (LHCP), right-handed circular polarization (RHCP), and linear polarization(LP). For the purpose of validation, a double-layer center-fed 11 x11-element transmitarray prototype is manufactured and tested at X-band. Measurement results demonstrate the designed transmitarray realize both high gain performance and multiple polarization operation.