A wideband circularly polarized antenna using mutual coupling method.

A novel wideband circularly polarized (CP) antenna is presented in this article. The proposed antenna consists of a four-leaf clover patch, four L-probes, and wideband networks. Based on the tightly coupled mechanism, the four L-probes are formed as a ring with the adjacent ones kept close for strong mutual coupling. Consequently, the proposed antenna realizes a wideband impedance matching. Meanwhile, the four-leaf clover patch is put closely inside of the ring for further improving the impedance bandwidth, which is proximity-coupled fed by the four sequential-rotation L-probes with phase of 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°. The four L-probes are connected to the respective ports of a wideband feeding network by a two-stage impedance transforming network. The measured results indicate that the proposed design has an impedance bandwidth of 66.7% from 1.0 to 2.0 GHz for VSWR ≤ 2 and a 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth of 56.5% from 1.08 to 1.93 GHz. Furthermore, in the operating bandwidth, stable and symmetry radiation patterns and high gain are obtained. The design has a 3-dB gain bandwidth of 38% from 1.3 to 1.9 GHz with a peak gain of 8.5 dBic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]