ANALYSIS PERFORMANCE OF SINGLY-FED CIRCULARLY POLARIZED MICROSTRIP ANTENNA FOR WIRELESS COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The circularly polarized (CP) microstrip antennas, both of singly- and doubly-fed types, possess inherent limitation in gain, impedance and axial-ratio bandwidths. These limitations are caused mainly by the natural resonance of the patch antenna which has a high unloaded Q-factor and the frequency-dependent excitation of two degenerative modes (TM01 and TM10) when using a single feed. Many applications which require circular polarization, large bandwidth, and good performance, especially in the field of wireless communication, are still difficult to be designed by using antenna software. Some consideration to take will include the application target and design specification, the materials to be used, and the method to choose (formula, numerical analysis, etc). This paper explains and analyzes the singly-fed microstrip antenna with circular polarization and large bandwidth. This singly-fed type of microstrip antenna provides certain advantage of requiring no external circular polarizer, e.g. the 90⁰ hybrid, as it only needs to apply some perturbation or modification to a patch radiator with a standard geometry. The design of CP and large-bandwidth microstrip antenna is done gradually, by firstly truncating one tip, then truncating the whole three tips, and finally modifying it into a pentagonal patch structure and adding an air-gap to obtain larger bandwidths of impedance, gain and axial ratio. The last one antenna structure results in a novelty because it is a rare design of antenna which includes all types of bandwidth (impedance, gain, and axial ratio) being simultaneously larger than the origin antenna. The resulted characteristic performance of the 1-tip (one-tip) antenna shows respectively 1.9% of impedance bandwidth, 3.1% of gain bandwidth, and 0.45% of axial-ratio bandwidth. For the 3-tip (three-tip) step, the resulted bandwidths of respectively impedance, gain, and axial ratio are 1.7%, 3.3% and 0.5%. The pentagonal structure resulted in the bandwith values of 15.67%, 52.16% and 4.11% respectively for impedance, gain, and axial ratio.