Switched-beam wideband circularly polarized 2 × 2 antenna array

This paper presents a wideband circularly polarized (CP) beam-steering antenna with the capability of generating several steerable beams. A single radiator is first constructed with two triangular-shaped dipoles, and four parasitic elements for wide CP operation bandwidth. The array antenna is implemented in a 2 × 2 arrangement and fed by a four-input port feeding network for the beam steering operation. The proposed antenna can generate CP axial beams in several directions with a suitable feed excitation. The final design with an overall size of 2λ₀ × 2λ₀ × 0.2λ₀ (at 6 GHz) showed that the proposed design exhibited approximately 48% and 46% impedance matching and axial ratio bandwidths, respectively. Furthermore, stable right-hand circular polarization radiation patterns with a gain of more than 11 dBic were observed for each beam direction.