Circular Polarized Reconfigurable Design of Elliptical Microstrip Antenna for GPS L‐Band Applications

ABSTRACT Frequency reconfigurable antennas are required in wireless applications, as they cover a wide spectrum addressing multiple bands, but with a smaller antenna size. The proposed study presents open circuit stubs loaded elliptical shape microstrip antenna design to provide tunable circular polarized response that covers various GPS L‐bands. A reconfigurable approach is used that selects the interconnection of stubs of increasing lengths, achieved through the suitable excitation of PIN diodes. Through this, orthogonal modes on the elliptical patch are tuned in their frequencies that provide a tuning frequency range from 1575 MHz (L1) to 1176 MHz (L5), thus addressing the complete global positioning system (GPS) spectrum. The antenna offers a broadside pattern in each band with axial ratio bandwidth greater than 2.5% and peak gain of more than 7 dBi, thereby satisfying the requirements of the GPS L‐band system. An experimental validation is carried out for the proposed designs that show close agreement against the simulated results.