A pattern reconfigurable printed patch antenna

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present the design, operation and fabrication of a pattern reconfigurable patch antenna. Two rectangular patches which are placed perpendicularly to each other are fed with a common feed line. These patches are fed from the corners so that the exact impedance matching could be obtained for both elements. Switching between the patches is achieved using PIN diodes, connected between the feed line and the patches. The biasing of the PIN diode 1 excites Patch 1, resulting in a broadside radiation pattern at 30° to the right side of the yz-plane with a gain of 5.85 dBi. The pattern is reconfigured by switching to Patch 2 using PIN diode 2, which gives a broadside radiation pattern at −30° to the left side of the yz-plane with a gain of 5.9 dBi. A good agreement between simulated and measured results is obtained at the 2.43 GHz resonating frequency. The antenna is printed on a low loss 1.524 thick Rogers TMM4 laminate (ε <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">r</inf> = 4.5, tanδ = 0.002). The antenna has an overall size of (58 × 100 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ).