A high gain 16 × 16 Ka-band circularly polarized planar array antenna

Abstract

In this article, a wide band circularly polarized microstrip array antenna with a gain of 26.5 dBiC at 29 GHz is developed and presented. The antenna structure contains six layers including the feeding and radiating layer. Modelling and experimental validations are performed on a 256 elements (16-by-16) antenna array. The proposed antenna comprises of corner truncated square patches that are fed at one feed point using the bottom layer corporate-feed network. The array exhibits S11<-10 dB over the frequency range 25–32.6 GHz (26.4%), axial ratio (AR) < 3 dB over 26.9–32 (17.3%) GHz and < 6° Half-Power Beamwidth (HPBW). The array antenna is fabricated through a multi-layer PCB process and has a size of 120 × 150 × 0.863 mm³. The measured results prove that the proposed antenna is a promising candidate for popular Ka-band applications like 5G and satellite communications.

KEYWORDS:

• Array
• axial ratio
• circularly polarized
• corporate-feed

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).