Decoupling of Multiple Antennas in Terminals With Chassis Excitation Using Polarization Diversity, Angle Diversity and Current Control

Excitation of the chassis enables single-antenna terminals to achieve good bandwidth and radiation performance, due to the entire chassis being utilized as the main radiator. In contrast, the same chassis excitation phenomenon complicates the design of multiple antennas for MIMO applications, since the same characteristic mode of the chassis may be effectively excited by more than one antenna, leading to strong mutual coupling and severe MIMO performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce a design concept for MIMO antennas to mitigate the chassis-induced mutual coupling, which is especially relevant for frequency bands below 1 GHz. We illustrate the design concept on a dual-antenna terminal at 0.93 GHz, where a folded monopole at one chassis edge excites the chassis' fundamental electric dipole mode and a coupled loop at the other chassis edge excites its own fundamental magnetic dipole mode. Since the two radiation modes are nearly orthogonal to each other, an isolation of over 30 dB is achieved. Moreover, we show that the antenna system can be conveniently modified for multiband operation, such as in the 900/1800/2600 MHz bands. Furthermore, by controlling the phase of the feed current on the folded monopole, the two antennas can be co-located on the same chassis edge with an isolation of over 20 dB. The co-located dual-antenna prototype was fabricated and verified in the measurements.