Design of a wideband polarisation conversion metasurface and its application for RCS reduction and gain enhancement of a circularly polarised antenna

An improved loading method of checkerboard-based linear polarisation conversion metasurface (PCM) is proposed for gain enhancement and wideband radar cross-section (RCS) reduction of the circularly polarised patch antenna (CPA). The proposed metasurface consists of a checkerboard arrangement of PCM and its mirror unit cells, and an improved loading method is used to rearrange the PCM unit cells around the radiating patch. The PCM unit cell is composed of a metallic pattern on the top and bottom surface covered with metal. A wideband RCS reduction is realised by achieving 180 degrees cross-polarisation reflection phase difference between the two neighbouring PCM unit cells and gain enhancement is achieved by the coherent superposition of energy in the far-field between the radiating patch and PCM cells. Simulated and measured results depict that the operating bandwidth of CPA and the proposed antenna is 12.6-13.76 GHz. The peak gain of the proposed antenna is 3.5 dB higher than the CPA and 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth of the designed antenna is 200 MHz. The proposed antenna achieves significant RCS reduction in the frequency range of 9.6-22.6 GHz with maximum in-band RCS reduction of 21 dB and maximum out of band RCS reduction of 34 dB.