Abstract-A new design for circularly-polarized (CP) slot antennas is first described. The antenna is a combination of a shorted square-ring slot and an L-shaped linear slot, and its CP operation frequency can be easily tuned under the condition that the slot area is unchanged. Based on the CP design, two reconfigurable slot antennas are then developed. One is a frequency reconfigurable antenna, whose CP operation frequency can be switched between two adjacent frequencies. The other is a polarization reconfigurable antenna, whose polarization can be switched between two orthogonal CP senses. The two reconfigurable antennas are realized using PIN diodes. Details of the designs and experimental results are shown.

A frequency reconfigurable antenna with dual-band operation is presented. The antenna has a circular radiating patch loaded with an annular slot, and the slotted patch is shorted to the ground plane with four conducting posts. The antenna has three feed ports. Two of the ports are used to excite the slot mode resonant at a lower frequency, and broadside radiation with dual orthogonal linear polarizations can be obtained. The other port is used to excite the monopolar-patch mode resonant at a higher frequency, and conical radiation with vertical polarization can be yielded. To reconfigure the operation frequencies, four varactors are symmetrically placed across the annular slot. The simulated results indicate that the resonant frequency of the slot mode can be tuned from 1.62 to 1.17 GHz when the capacitance of the varactors is varied from 0.6 to 1.8 pF; besides, for each capacitance value, the impedance bandwidth of the antenna operating in the monopolar-patch mode can cover the frequencies from 2.4 to 2.5 GHz. Experiments are also carried out to validate the simulated data.