Comparison of a four stage sequentially rotated wideband circularly polarized high gain microstrip patch array antennas at Ku-band

Abstract

Two sequentially rotated, four stage, wideband circularly polarized high gain microstrip patch array antennas at Ku-band are investigated and compared by incorporating both unequal and equal power division based feeding networks. Four stages of sequential rotation is used to create 16×16 patch array which provides wider common bandwidth between the impedance matching (S 11 < −10dB), 3dB axial ratio and 3dB gain of 12.3% for the equal power divider based feed array and 13.2% for the unequal power divider based feed array in addition to high polarization purity. The high peak gain of 28.5dBic is obtained for the unequal power division feed based array antennas compared to 26.8dBic peak gain in the case of the equal power division based feed array antennas. The additional comparison between two feed networks based arrays reveals that the unequal power divider based array antennas provide better array characteristics than the equal power divider based feed array antennas.