Compact Ultrathin Wideband Pattern-Reconfigurable Antenna With Enhanced Operating Bandwidth

This letter presents a compact ultrathin wideband pattern-reconfigurable antenna (PRA), which is composed of four reconfigurable tapered slot antenna (TSA) units and a reconfigurable feeding network. By reconfiguring the feeding network only, mono-excitation (ME) mode is activated, in which the corresponding TSA units can be excited, and radiates endfire beams pointing to ϕ = 0°, 90°, 180° or 270°, respectively. By jointly reconfiguring the TSA units and feeding network, dual excitation (DE) mode is activated, in which two adjacent TSA units can be excited simultaneously, the other two TSA units are reconfigured by conducting the diodes bridged onto their tapered slots. Thus, the antenna can radiate four endfire beams pointing to ϕ = 45°, 135°, 225° or 315°, respectively. The proposed joint reconfigurable structure work collaboratively in bandwidth extension and radiation enhancement. The prototype is measured and analyzed. The measured overlapped operating bandwidth of all eight states are 68.0% (3.16-6.42 GHz), and the gains range from 3.0 to 5.2 dBi. In the bandwidth, the 3dB beams of all eight states could cover the entire azimuth plane with gain fluctuation less than 3dB.