A Novel Stacked Antenna Configuration and its Applications in Dual-Band Shared-Aperture Base Station Antenna Array Designs

A novel stacked antenna configuration is proposed for the designs of shared-aperture base station antennas. An antenna array consisting of a lower-band antenna element working in 690-960 MHz frequency band and four upper-band antenna elements operating in the 3.5-4.9 GHz band is designed to demonstrate the concept. In the proposed configuration, four upper-band antenna elements are placed over the aperture of the lower-band antenna. Four metallic sheets are introduced to provide capacitive loading for the lower-band antenna and simultaneously offer a ground plane for the upper-band antennas. Therefore, low-profile characteristic and high isolations between the dual-band antennas are guaranteed. The overall height of the antenna array is only 0.17 lambda(L0) (lambda(L0) is the free-space wavelength at the center frequency of the lower band), which is much lower than those of conventional designs. The measured results demonstrate that the designed antenna array achieves 32.7% and 33.3% impedance bandwidth in the lower and upper bands, respectively. High port isolations (>30 dB), high gains (>8 dBi), and stable radiation patterns are achieved in the two frequency bands. Owing to its simple structure and compact size, the resultant antenna array is easy for fabrication and is a promising candidate for sub-6 GHz band and 690-960 MHz band antennas.