An Omnidirectional Circularly Polarized Antenna Array

Abstract

An omnidirectional circularly polarized (CP) antenna array is proposed. The antenna array is composed of four identical CP antenna elements and one parallel strip-line feeding network. Each of CP antenna elements comprises a dipole and a zero-phase-shift (ZPS) line loop. The in-phase fed dipole and the ZPS line loop generate vertically and horizontally polarized omnidirectional radiation, respectively. Furthermore, the vertically polarized dipole is positioned in the center of the horizontally polarized ZPS line loop. The size of the loop is designed such that a 90° phase difference is realized between the two orthogonal components because of the spatial difference and, therefore, generates CP omnidirectional radiation. A 1 × 4 antenna array at 900 MHz is prototyped and targeted to ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) applications. The measurement results show that the antenna array achieves a 10-dB return loss over a frequency range of 900-935 MHz and 3-dB axial-ratio (AR) from 890 to 930 MHz. At the frequency of 915 MHz, the measured maximum AR of 1.53 dB, maximum gain of 5.4 dBic, and an omnidirectionality of ±1 dB are achieved.