A Wideband Differentially Driven Dual-Polarized Antenna by Using Integrated Six-Port Power Divider

A new method to design wideband differentially driven dual-polarized antenna with high common-mode suppression and high port isolation is presented. The presented antenna can be equivalent as a combination of a six-port power divider and four crossed folded dipoles. The six-port power divider is composed of two orthogonal input ports and four equal magnitude output ports. Detailed analysis illustrates that the six-port power divider can have wide bandwidth and high isolation under odd-mode excitation and high common-mode suppression under even-mode excitation. Therefore, based on the wideband and high even-mode suppressed six-port power divider, a wideband differentially driven dual-polarized antenna is developed with high common-mode suppression. To validate the design concept, the proposed antenna was designed, fabricated, and measured. The measured results prove that the antenna has a wide impedance bandwidth of 1.64-3.0 GHz (58.6%) for the return loss higher than 15 dB and isolation higher than 35.4 dB. In addition, very high common-mode suppression is achieved for the measured common-mode reflection coefficient higher than -0.87 dB over the entire bandwidth. With stable antenna gain and half-power beamwidth, the developed antenna is suitable for base station applications.