On the Precise Examination of Multi-Port Antennas; Corrections and Criticisms to Some Recently Reported Results

Abstract

In this paper, precise examination of multi-port antennas with large mutual coupling between the ports is studied. For this purpose, some vital parameters such as active reflection coefficients and realised gain are emphasized. The main motivation of this research is the ignorance of this issue in several recently published papers. Hence, corrections and criticisms to some recently reported results are presented. At first, a microstrip patch consisting of two inverted U-slots is re-examined, which has been proposed in a recently published paper for wideband applications. However, the authors did not present satisfactory results to indicate the performance of the proposed structure. In reverse, some important parameters such as the antenna gain appear to be incorrectly reported. In this paper, the characteristics of the antenna are compared with a simple 50 Ω microstrip line excited by two probes, indicating no significant differences. In the remainder of this paper, some corrections are provided on two examples of wide-beam circularly polarised multi-fed antennas for satellite applications. The first example is the multi-fed spiral antennas with folded arms, which have been proposed as the widebeam antennas at 435 MHz. It is indicated that the antenna height should be increased for better performance. The second example is the quadrifilar square helical antennas with folded arms, which have been proposed as the widebeam antennas for 435 MHz with minor responses at 145 MHz. Some corrections are presented on the previously reported minor responses at 145 MHz.