Investigation of mutual coupling effects on Beidou navigation antenna arrays

In this paper, the comparisons of four different Beidou B3 navigation antenna arrays with different radiation elements have been presented. For antenna elements, its size, bandwidth and gain properties have been observed. Then, four different four-element arrays constituted by different elements are presented. For these arrays, they have the same distance between elements and the same size ground plane. Furthermore, mutual coupling performances among the arrays have been investigated. From the investigation results, it shows that different mutual coupling performances have been observed in these arrays. Among these four arrays, quadrifilar helix antenna exhibits a 10 dB mutual coupling reduction at B3 band than any other arrays. In addition, it is also demonstrated that the good isolation performance improves the antenna's radiation properties in array environment.