A Small Printed Inverted-F Antenna for Circular Polarization

Abstract

In this paper, a printed inverted-F antenna for radiating circularly polarized wave around its resonant frequency is proposed. To get good axial ratio at the frequency band with 10dB-return loss, a rectangular element is loaded at the feeding line perpendicularly. The axial ratio and the frequency giving the minimum axial ratio can be adjusted by the ratio of the length to the width of the whole antenna and by the dimension of the loaded rectangular element. The operational principle for circular polarization is explained using the electric current distributions. Moreover, the approach of the enhancement for the bandwidth is discussed. The simulated and measured bandwidths of the 10dB-return loss with a 3dB-axial ratio are 2.375GHz-2.591GHz (216MHz) and 2.350-2.534GHz (184MHz), respectively. The proposed antenna's dimension is 0.067λ²_c (λ_c is the wavelength at the center frequency). The proposed antenna is compact and planar, and is therefore useful for circular polarization in the ISM band.