A MEMS based shorted spiral antenna

Recently, a single-arm rectangular spiral antenna with a switching network is proposed by the authors for switched beam applications. A spiral configuration using four shorting switches for both single- and multi-point switching is investigated in A. Mehta et a. (2005) where characteristics of sixteen possible switching cases are outlined. In this paper for the first time, both MEMS and hard wired switching is experimentally incorporated and under these conditions, the performance of the antenna is compared