A Design of Wideband Dual-Polarized Microstrip Phased Array Antenna with Low Cost

A design of dual-linear-polarization microstrip phased array antenna with low cost is proposed in this paper. The antenna is based on the class of the aperture-coupled stacked patches. One antenna unit is fed by two H-shaped slots. The antenna is composed of one feeding network, one primary radiation path, one parasitic radiation path and two support structures. The antenna is low-cost and low profile, all the components of the antenna are processed with cheap material and are easy to assemble. An antenna working in X band is designed to verify the idea. When the standing wave ratio is less than 2, the proposed antenna can reach <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\pm 30^{\circ}$</tex> scanning angle of horizontal plane and vertical plane within the working bandwidth of 4.0 GHz. The gain in bandwidth is greater than 3.4 dB, and the isolation is above 16.0 dB. Based on the designed antenna unit, a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$4 \times 4$</tex> array is constructed and simulated; the simulated results show that the operating bandwidth is about 4.0 GHz (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$8.0-12.0 \text{GHz}$</tex>). At 10.0 GHz, the isolation between the ports is −24.5 dB, the cross-polarization level is less than −31.8 dB compared with the co-polarization level, and the realized gain can reach <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$15.7 \text{dBi}$</tex>.