INTRODUCTIONCircularly polarized patch antennas have been widely applied in wireless communication system, global positioning system, etc., because of their low-profile, lightweight, ease of fabrication and low lost [1,2]. To achieve high performance for circularly polarized patch antennas, some new structures were reported in the literature, such as antennas array, stack layer antennas, using periodic structures [3][4][5][6][7], etc.In this paper, a high performance circularly polarized low frequency patch antenna based on the compact fractal high-impedance surface EBG structure has been fabricated and experimented. The measured results show that the proposed circularly polarized patch antenna has good performance in impedance bandwidth, axial ratio (AR) bandwidth, and gain.
THE NOVEL EBG CIRCULARLY POLARIZED ANTENNA DESIGNA fractal structure is applied on the hi-impedance surface structure in order to reduce the size of EBG cell. The fractal cell is provided using the Minkowski loop generator. The initial shape is the square patch of side A (0 th iteration). For the 1 st and 2 rd iteration, each side is replaced with new scaled generator (A1=A/3; B1=0.5*A1, A2=A1/3, B2=0.5*A2), where A1, A2 and B1, B2 are segment and indentation lengths, respectively ( Fig.1). The period of the proposed EBG structure is 32.5mm, and A=27mm. A fractal patch connected to the continuous ground plane through a shorting pin constitutes a unit of the lattice. The radius of the shorting pin is 0.5mm.The dispersion characteristics of the fractal Hi-Impedance Surface EBG structure is calculated using the Finite Element Method (FEM). The results illustrated in Fig.2 show a wide bandgap from 1.27GHz to 2.05GHz.A square patch antenna with truncated opposite corners is designed as Fig.3, which excites both the TM 01 and TM 10 orthogonal modes, can produce circularly polarized fields. The square patch antenna size is 56.0×56.0m 2 , which have two opposite truncated corners with a side length of 2.8mm. The feed point is offset from the centre point of the square patch by 9.35 mm. The substrate used is FR4, which has a dielectric constant r ε =4.4, the thickness h=3.04mm and the ground plane size is 130mm×130mm. In general, because of the surface wave, the gain of the conventional patch antenna on a high permittivity substrate is low and the bandwidth is very narrow. In this paper, a novel circularly polarized antenna with a fractal EBG structure is presented. This fractal high impedance surface EBG structure is proposed because of its compact size and wide bandwidth features. The performance of this patch antenna is thus improved with the help of EBG structures. which illustrates an impedance bandwidth from 1660 to1712MHz below 10 dB. The measured axial ratio in the broadside direction against frequency is shown in Fig.6, which axial ratio bandwidth is from 1.678 to 1.705MHz. The measurement results show the centre frequency 1.695GHz has a minimum axial ratio, about 0.80dB. The XoZ plane and YoZ plane's radiation patterns at 1.695GHz are show...