Circularly polarized patch antenna with simultaneously wide frequency tuning range and high gain performance

Summary A tunable circularly polarized square patch antenna with parasitic elements is designed for a wide frequency tuning range and high gain characteristics. The proposed antenna is constructed by one main patch and four semi‐elliptic parasitic units. By loading four varactor diodes and adjusting their capacitance values, the tunable feature is performed to reallocate the corresponding working frequency. Moreover, the diagonal corners of the antenna are cut and loaded with varactor diodes, which provide the appropriate perturbation between the two orthogonality modes of the antenna, so as to ensure the circular polarization characteristic in the entire operating tuning band. The experimental results demonstrate that the reflection coefficient and axial ratio are less than −13 dB and 3 dB, respectively. The proposed antenna features a relatively wide continuously tuning range of 24% within 1.9‐2.3 GHz and a stable gain of over 7 dBi with a radiation efficiency of above 85%. A tunable circularly polarized square patch antenna with parasitic elements is proposed, by utilizing the method of varactor‐diode‐loaded patches and varactor‐diode‐loaded perturbation, a wide frequency tuning range and high gain characteristic are readily achieved simultaneously.