Singly-fed rectangular dielectric resonator antenna with a wide circular polarization bandwidth and beamwidth for WiMAX/satellite applications

Abstract

A rectangular dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) has been excited using a unique conformal H-shaped metal strip. Using this excitation, the degenerate mode pair of first higher orderTE d13 x and TE 1d3 y has been excited for bandwidth improvement and high gain. A broadband circular polarization (CP) over a bandwidth of -20% (3.67-4.4 GHz) in conjunction with a wide impedance-matching bandwidth of -27.7% (3.67-4.73 GHz) has been achieved. A CP beamwidth of 89° has been offered by the antenna in F = 0° plane and -32° in F = 90° plane. A high gain of -6.8 dBic has been provided by the antenna, which is a significant improvement to those circularly polarized rectangular DRAs reported in the literature for similar applications. This broad CP bandwidth and beamwidth can be considerably beneficial for the worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) and satellite applications. Furthermore, the proposed antenna has been fabricated to validate the simulated results. The measured results have been observed to agree well with the simulated results.