Compact Omnidirectional Circularly Polarized Antenna

In certain radar and wireless communication applications, omnidirectional circularly polarized (CP) antennas are desired but existing solutions have complex 3-D structures and are large in size. In this paper, a compact and low profile CP antenna having omnidirectional pattern on azimuthal plane is demonstrated. The CP waveform is synthesized by combining two linearly polarized and omnidirectional antennas with 90° phase difference on their terminals. The most challenging part of the design is the realization of the horizontally polarized antenna with omnidirectional radiation pattern. This antenna is designed using a novel two-faced slot antenna structure capable of emitting in-phase radiation of equal magnitude on both sides of the antenna. The two faces of the low-profile slot antenna are connected by a thin meander parallel plate waveguide to provide antiparallel field distributions over the two faces of the slot radiators. This special design removes radiation nulls on E-plane that exists on conventional slot antennas, the mechanism of which has been carefully discussed in this paper. The other antenna is a compatible pair of planar inverted-F antennas constructed on the sides of the finite-ground plane two-faced slot antenna for the provision of vertically polarized omnidirectional radiation. A feed network with power splitter and phase shifter is also accommodated on the compact CP antenna. The antenna is designed and fabricated, and its performance is measured against numerical simulations. It is shown that the fabricated antenna at 2.4 GHz can provide measured axial ratio of lower than 1.8 and gain variations of less than ±1.5 dB over all azimuth angles.