Analysis and measurements of reflection phase shifters at 1.5 and 18.5 GHz

This paper is concerned with the use of phase shifters in steerable antennas when there is a need to change the orientation of the radiation pattern. There are a number of types of phase shifters but, for phase shifts above 90 degrees, transmission or reflection type phase shifters offer prefered solutions. The difference in performance between these two types of phase shifters does not appear to be very significant, but transmission type phase shifters may have an advantage in offering phase shifts less affected by the load characteristics, while the reflection type phase shifter is controled by two pin diodes only (instead of three) which may lead to a somewhat less expensive design. In this paper we focus mainly on the behaviour of different reflection type phase shifters design and we present some experimental results for an phase shifters in the 1.5 and 18.5 GHz bands.