Rectangular microstrip with co-planar corner loading: advanced antenna and array design for high cross-polar isolation across all radiation planes

Abstract

A newly conceived microstrip element, that features adequately suppressed cross-polar discrimination (XPD) over both the orthogonal (H-) and diagonal (D-) planes, has been explored here. The proposed patch is of rectangular shape with a pair of loading at its corner region. A standalone patch as well as its linear and square array formation has been investigated. Their design and characterization along with a partial experimental verification are presented. They promise considerable improvement in D-plane XPD, around 6 dB for single element, 10 dB for four-element linear and 5 dB for four-element square sub-arrays. The XPD performance over H-plane is equally promising, 8 dB for single element (10-18) dB for both planar and square arrays. The overall 3D-XP scenario thus gets improved by about (8-10) dB on average which is quite significant in the case of arrays.