A reconfigurable beam-switching antenna base on active FSS

In this paper, a reconfigurable beam-switching antenna is designed and fabricated. The geometry of this antenna is designed as a hexagonal cylinder and composed of two major parts. One is the dipole antenna at the center of the structure as an excitation source and the other part is the active selective surfaces (FSS). A bowtie pattern is used as the unit cell of FSS, and its characteristic is carefully optimized. In this study, when the diode is turned on, the FSS becomes transparent, and when the diode is turned off, the FSS is opaque, which is unlike conventional operation. The default operation is to set 3 sidewalls transparent and 3 sidewalls opaque. The opaque sidewalls act as a reflector. The measured results show that radiation pattern can be swept in six steps along the entire azimuth plane with moderate gain of 5dBi and 80° beam-width at 2.5GHz. With these features, this simple and low cost beam-switching antenna is suitable for wireless communication system and the application of low power base station system.