A Filtering Patch Antenna With Reconfigurable Frequency and Bandwidth Using F-Shaped Probe

A wideband filtering patch antenna is investigated in this paper. The patch antenna is fed by an F-shaped probe, which consists of one upper and two lower horizontal arms, as well as a vertical arm that connects them. Owing to the novel excitation scheme, two probe modes along with a patch mode are simultaneously excited within the passband, producing a wide bandwidth of 21.3% with stable antenna gains and radiation patterns. Meanwhile, cross-coupling is constructed in the antenna, generating two symmetrical radiation nulls right at the two sides of the passband. Consequently, a compact filtering antenna with bandpass response and high selectivity is obtained, without utilizing any extra filtering circuit. This design is also extended to realize a reconfigurable filtering antenna. Two varactor diodes are embedded in the F-shaped probe to continuously tune the frequency of the operating band from 2.05 to 2.52 GHz. The antenna bandwidth can be flexibly tuned from 2.2% to 21.3%, and simultaneously good filtering performance is kept during the tuning of different states.