Cross-slot-coupled microstrip antenna and dielectric resonator antenna for circular polarization

Circular polarization (CP) design of microstrip antennas and dielectric resonator (DR) antennas through a cross slot of unequal slot lengths in the ground plane of a microstrip line is demonstrated. The proposed CP design is achieved by choosing a suitable size of the coupling cross slot, which results in the excitation of two near-degenerate orthogonal modes of near-equal amplitudes and 90/spl deg/ phase difference. This CP design can be applied to both configurations of microstrip antennas and DR antennas and has the advantages of easy fine-tuning and less sensitivity to the manufacturing tolerances, as compared to their respective conventional single-feed CP designs. For the proposed design applied to a low-profile circular disk DR antenna of very high permittivity studied here, a large CP bandwidth, determined from 3-dB axial ratio, as high as 3.91% is also obtained. Details of the proposed antenna designs are described, and experimental results of the CP performance are presented and discussed.