A wideband dual-polarized crossed antenna with low profile and enhanced gain performance

Abstract

A wideband dual-line polarized antenna with low-profile property is presented in this paper. The dual-polarized antenna consists of two crossed antenna elements over a metal reflector and is excited by RF connectors vertically. Here, the crossed antenna element is based on Vivaldi radiator to obtain wideband performance. By loading resistors on the patches of Vivaldi radiator, not only the impedance matching of the proposed antenna can be improved further but also the profile is reduced greatly. Whatever, the loaded resistors can also depress radiation efficiency of the antenna element to a certain extent, especially in the lower band. For this reason, three periodic slots etched on the Vivaldi radiator are introduced herein to enhance the gain performance. To verify the feasibility of the proposed design, a prototype has been fabricated and measured. The results show good performance of a relative bandwidth of 153% for VSWR ≤ 2 (2-15 GHz) and a low profile of 0.22 λ_L (in terms of the lowest frequency of the band). Besides, the prototype can achieve an average gain of approximately 5 dBi and a maximum radiation efficiency of 80% within passband.