A Novel Compact Dual Band Reconfigurable Power Divider for Smart Antenna Systems

This paper presents a novel compact dual band reconfigurable power divider for smart antenna systems. The circuit employs two cascaded dual band hybrid couplers connected through two dual band discontinuities. The dual band discontinuities, consisting of a diplexer and two varactor diodes, can be tuned through two different biasing voltages thus allowing an independent and arbitrary choice of the power ratio in the two frequency bands. A prototype has been designed to operate in the dual band WLAN frequency range, and fabricated in microstrip technology on a 25 mils CER10 substrate. Measured scattering parameters exhibit good performance in terms of return loss, insertion loss and isolation in both WLAN bands, confirming the feasibility of the proposed architecture. The compactness of the circuit makes it suitable for employment in array configurations.