A Hexaband Quad-Circular-Polarization Slotted Patch Antenna for 5G, GPS, WLAN, LTE, and Radio Navigation Applications

A hexaband, quad-circular-polarization (CP) slotted patch antenna for 5G (3.5 GHz), GPS L5 (1.17 GHz), GPS L1 (1.57 GHz), wireless local area network (WLAN) IEEE 802.11b/g/n (2.4 GHz), LTE(Long Term Evolution) (0.7 GHz), and radio navigation (1.3 GHz) applications is proposed in this letter. Primarily, the patch antenna is optimized to excite the modes TM100, TM110, TM210, and TM220at 0.7, 1.17, 1.57, and 2.4 GHz, respectively, while being fed by a single microstrip line. Then, the feeding microstrip line is tuned such that three additional hybrid modes EH1, EH3, and EH4are excited to resonate at 1.3 GHz and a contiguous band 2.7-3.6 GHz. Meanwhile, a rotated and inverted S-shaped slot is etched on the patch metal to split surface currents of each of the modes TM110, TM210, EH3, and EH4into two orthogonal and 90°phase-shifted versions, enabling the antenna to radiate CP waves at 1.17, 1.57, 3.18, and 3.5 GHz. While supporting quad-band CP operation, the proposed antenna is simply proximity-fed by a single microstrip line, which omits the need for external feeding networks and reduces the cost and complexity. The proposed antenna gain ranges from 3 to 9 dBi/dBic over operating bands.