2090 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO.
4, APRIL 2018
Communication
Wideband Reconfigurable Crossed-Dipole Antenna
With Quad-Polarization Diversity
Jeen-Sheen Row
Abstract— A design for antennas with quad-polarization diversity is
described. The antenna structure is mainly composed of a reconfigurable
crossed-dipole fed with coaxial baluns and a switchable feeding network.
By controlling the states of p-i-n diodes embedded in the balun feeds,
the crossed dipole can generate vertical and horizontal polarization
radiations, and the phase of each polarization mode can be switched
between 0° and 180°. As for the feeding network, it has four output
ports and only two output ports are set to be active to excite the crossed
dipole at a time. By integrating the crossed dipole with the feeding
network, the resultant antenna can provide four polarization modes,
including ±45° linear polarizations (LPs) and dual-orthogonal circular
polarizations (CPs). Moreover, the overlapped operation bandwidth of the
four polarization modes is more than 35%, and within the bandwidth,
the cross polarization level of the LP modes is less than −20 dB and
the axial ratio of the CP modes is smaller than 3 dB. Good impedance
matching is also achieved for each polarization mode.
Index Terms— Broadband antenna, crossed-dipole antenna, polariza-
tion reconfigurable antenna.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Antennas with polarization diversity are widely applied into present
wireless communication systems for increasing transmission capacity
and improving signal quality. Consequently, quit a few studies
have been made on how to increase the number of switchable
polarization modes and improve the operation bandwidth of the
polarization reconfigurable antenna. Based on the perturbation tech-
nology, a microstrip antenna fabricated on a thin substrate can easily
realize the switching between linear polarization (LP) and circular
polarization (CP) [1], but the available operation bandwidth is limited
(less than 3%) and unpractical. The bandwidth can be effectively
improved using a planar slot antenna. A typical reconfigurable design
using the slot antenna is presented in [2], where the switching among
one LP and two orthogonal CP is achieved within an operation
bandwidth of 7%. A corner-truncated patch antenna with an air
substrate of 0.09 λ0 is also adopted to realize the switching between
two orthogonal CP modes, and the overlapped bandwidth of the two
modes is about 10% [3]. The CP bandwidth is also further improved
to 12.7% when a suspended ring patch antenna with an air substrate
of 0.25 λ0 is used to perform the polarization diversity [4].
A multiport antenna integrated with a feeding network can not
only provide more polarization modes but also enhance the operation
bandwidth [5]–[7]. A dual-port ring patch antenna excited with a
tunable power divider is described in [5], and the polarization can
be switched among one LP and dual-orthogonal CP modes within
an operation bandwidth of 13%. In [6], four sequentially rotated
radiating arms are connected to the outputs of a switchable feeding
Manuscript received September 18, 2017; revised January 2, 2018; accepted
January 26, 2018. Date of publication February 1, 2018; date of current version
April 5, 2018. (Corresponding author: Jeen-Sheen Row.)
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National
Changhua University of Education, Chang-Hua 500, Taiwan (e-mail:
jsrow@cc.ncue.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are
available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2018.2800785
0018-926X © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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and You-Heng Wei
network, and the operation bandwidth of the CP reconfigurable
antenna is up to 23%. Ho and Rebeiz [7] adopt a frequency-agile
microstrip antenna with four input ports, and a wideband coupler
is used to excite each port of the antenna. Although the integrated
antenna can well perform the quad-polarization diversity within
50% bandwidth, the antenna gain would be obviously degraded with
a decrease of frequency.
As compared to the microstrip patch antenna, a crossed dipole has
a wider impedance bandwidth as well as a lower cross polarization
level (XPL), and consequently it is a good candidate to realize the
design of wideband polarization reconfigurable antennas. Recently,
several polarization reconfigurable designs using the crossed dipole
have been reported [8]–[10]. In [8], the polarization of the crossed
dipole can be switched between two orthogonal LP modes from
1.7 to 2.7 GHz. A tri-polarization reconfigurable magneto-electric
dipole is described in [9], where the operation bandwidths of the
±45° LP modes are 31% but the 3 dB-axial-ratio bandwidth of the
CP mode is only 7.9%. The antenna reported in [10] further completes
the design with four polarization switching, and the overlapped
bandwidth of the four modes is up to 16%. For the latter two
designs, no feeding network is involved and the antenna efficiency
can reach 80%; however, the available operation bandwidths of
these reconfigurable antennas are not wide enough for applications
of present wireless communication systems, and they are primarily
limited by the 3 dB-axial-ratio bandwidth of the CP mode. At the cost
of decreasing antenna efficiency, the CP bandwidth would be consid-
erably increased provided that a multiport crossed-dipole antenna is
integrated with a proper feeding network. For example, wideband CP
radiation can be easily obtained by integrating a traditional dual-port
crossed dipole with a 90° hybrid coupler; however, the integrated
antenna cannot provide LP operation. To realize the full polarization
switching, the dual-port crossed dipole needs to be excited with a
tunable coupler that can be operated in a 3 dB hybrid mode and
an uncoupled-line mode, such as the circuit reported in [11]. For
such an integrated antenna, one dipole is a dummy element when
the antenna is operated in each LP mode, implying that the effective
receiving area is lowered. In addition, the tunable coupler is often
used to design a frequency-agile or narrowband polarization diversity
antenna [12]–[14], but it is unsuitable to realize a polarization
reconfigurable antenna with wideband operation.
In this communication, a simple feeding network, consisting of a
power divider, two single-pole double-throw (SPDT), and a 90° delay
line, is used to excite a four-port crossed dipole. The integrated
antenna can offer four polarization modes, including ±45° LPs, right-
handed CP (RHCP), and left-handed CP (LHCP). Due to the use of
the four-port crossed dipole, all of the dipole arms are excited with
the same amplitude for each polarization mode, suggesting that the
proposed reconfigurable antenna has the similar main beams and the
identical effective receiving area when its polarization is switched
among the four modes. Moreover, the crossed dipole operating in
the CP mode can be regarded as a sequential-rotation array, and a
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO. 4, APRIL 2018
Fig. 1. Structure of a four-port crossed-dipole antenna.
3 dB-axial-ratio bandwidth of more than 35% is obtained. Details
of the antenna designs are shown. Measured results of constructed
prototypes are also presented.
II. F OUR -P ORT C ROSSED D IPOLE
Fig. 1 depicts the structure of a four-port reconfigurable crossed-
dipole antenna. The arm of the dipole is made of a triangular patch
fabricated on a FR4 substrate of thickness 0.4 mm, and a slit, having
the dimensions of l × w, is embedded into the patch. The total length
of each dipole is L, and the width of the outer edge is W . The
crossed dipole is fed with four symmetrical coaxial cables (Cable A–
D) with a length of h + 0.4 mm, and the input ports are, respectively,
named Port A, Port B, Port C, and Port D. For each cable, one
end of the outer conductor is connected to the square ground plane
with a side length of 150 mm, and the other end is soldered to the
triangular patch. As for the four inner conductors of the cables, the
opposite ends are linked together via a capacitor of 100 pF, as shown
in Fig. 1. The distance between the feed point (the position of the
inner conductor) and the shorted edge of the slit is s which is the key
parameter of obtaining 50  impedance matching at the input ports.
For reducing the back radiation and improving the antenna gain, four
sidewalls with a height of H are attached to the planar ground plane.
To control the polarization and phase of the antenna radiation, four p-
i-n diodes (DA , DB , DC , DD ) are symmetrically placed in the antenna
structure, and two ends of each diode are, respectively, connected
to the inner conductor of the cable and the triangular patch. When
one diode is ON, the corresponding coaxial cable is short-circuited
and it can be regarded as a metallic cylinder. The combination of the
metallic cylinder and the opposite normal coaxial cable forms a well-
known coaxial balun feed [8]. With this arrangement, the crossed
dipole can simultaneously generate x-directed (horizontal) and y-
directed (vertical) LP radiations as (DA , DC ) is OFF and (DB , DD )
is ON. On the contrary, when (DA , DC ) is ON and (DB , DD ) is
OFF, the electric-field directions of the dual orthogonal LP modes
are reversed, representing that the excitation phase is switched from
0° to 180°. It has to be mentioned that the crossed dipole is excited
with a balance feed as the polarization or phase is reconfigured.
An example is selected to illustrate the performances of the
four-port dipole antenna, and it has the dimensions of L = 46 mm,
W = 38 mm, l = 17.5 mm, w = 5 mm, s = 2 mm, h = 38 mm,
and H = 25 mm. Fig. 2 exhibits the return loss and isolation of
the example antenna when (DA , DC ) is OFF and (DB , DD ) is ON.
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2091
Fig. 2. Simulated return loss and isolation of the crossed-dipole antenna.
Fig. 3. Simulated radiation patterns of the crossed-dipole antenna. (a) Port A
is excited. (b) Port C is excited.
The results are obtained using a high frequency structure simulator.
In the simulation, the diodes at ON state are modeled as a series
circuit of L = 0.7 nH and R = 3.5 , and the diodes at OFF state
are modeled as a series circuit of L = 0.7 nH and C T = 0.2 pF.
From Fig. 2, it is found that the two active input ports, Port A
and Port C, have good impedance matching and their 10 dB-return-
loss impedance bandwidths are about 30% with respect to the center
frequency 1.9 GHz; moreover, the isolation (SAC ) between them is
lower than −40 dB within the impedance bandwidth. The isolation
levels (SAB and SAD ) between the active and inactive ports are
also presented in Fig. 2, and the results demonstrate that SAB is
around −15 dB and SAD is down to −50 dB. When the example
antenna is operated in the horizontal and vertical polarization modes,
the radiation patterns simulated at 1.9 GHz are plotted in Fig. 3. For
each polarization mode, symmetrical broadside radiation patterns are
seen in the xz and yz planes.
Moreover, the simulated XPL is lower than −40 dB, not revealed
in Fig. 3, and the front-to-back ratio is about 20 dB. Based on the two
pure LP radiations, various polarization modes would be generated
from the four-port antenna. For example, +45° (−45°) LP radiation
can be obtained as Port A and Port C (Port D) are simultaneously
excited with the same amplitude and phase. The LHCP (RHCP)
radiation can also be acquired as long as Port B and Port C (Port D)
are simultaneously excited with the same amplitude and a phase
difference of 90°. To realize the above polarization modes, a feeding
network that can properly excite the four ports of the crossed dipole
is necessary.
III. F EEDING N ETWORK AND P OLARIZATION
R ECONFIGURABLE A NTENNA D ESIGN
Fig. 4 depicts the layout of a 1 × 4 feeding network that is mainly
composed of a Wilkinson power divider and dual-SPDT switches.
2092 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO. 4, APRIL 2018

Fig. 4. Layout of a switchable feeding network.

The output ports of the feeding network can be divided into two pairs,
in which one pair is (Port 2, Port 4) and the other pair is (Port 3,
Port 5). With the SPDT, one port of each pair is active and the other
port is switched to be inactive. The operations of the dual-SPDT Fig. 5. Photographs of the completed prototypes. (a) Front view of crossed
dipole. (b) Feeding network. (c) Crossed dipole with feeding networking.
switches are determined with the dc biases (V2 , V3 , V4 , V5 ). As Vi
(i = 2, 3, 4, and 5) is 2 V, Port i of the feeding network is active.
Moreover, another four dc voltages (VA , VB , VC , VD ) are required to
control the states of the p-i-n diodes in the four-port crossed dipole,
and they are also arranged in the feeding network. For VA , VB , VC ,
and VD , their positive ends are connected to the microstrip lines
through an RF choke consisting of a meandering high-impedance
line and a grounded capacitor, and their negative ends are directly
linked to the ground plane of the circuit, as shown in Fig. 4. When
V j ( j = A, B, C, and D) is 2 V, Cable j is equivalent to a metallic
cylinder. A polarization reconfigurable antenna can be carried out by
integrating the four-port crossed dipole with the feeding network. The
integration is performed with four coaxial cables. Cable #A2 is used
for the connection between Port A and Port 2. Port B and Port 4
are linked together with Cable #B4. Cable #C3 connects Port C and
Port 3, and Cable #D5 connects Port D and Port 5. To generate Fig. 6. Measured return loss and isolation of the crossed-dipole antenna.
CP radiation, Cable #B4 is designedly made be shorter than the
other cables so that Port B is excited with a leading phase of 90°.
By properly controlling the eight dc voltages, the polarization mode
which agree with the simulation results. The measured SAB is also
of the integrated antenna can be switched among +45° LP, −45°
similar to the simulation results, and it can be further improved
LP, RHCP, and LHCP. For the four operation modes, the setting of
with a diode that has a higher isolation (or lower CT ) at OFF state.
each dc voltage source and the excited polarization components of
Because of manufacturing errors, the measured isolation levels (SAC
the crossed dipole are summarized in Table I. It is worth noting that
and SAD ) of the two orthogonal ports are lower than the simulated
the two dipoles are simultaneously excited well for the ±45° LP
data. As regards the experimental results of the feeding network,
modes, and the consequence is that the integrated antenna operating
the typical S-parameters are given in Fig. 7, and they are obtained
in the two LP modes has a larger effective receiving area than
under the condition that Port 2 and Port 3 are set to be active. From
traditional dual-polarization crossed-dipole antennas. Furthermore,
Fig. 7, it can be observed that from 1.5 to 2.3 GHz, the reflection
when the integrated antenna is operated in the RHCP or LHCP mode,
coefficient (S11 ) at the signal input port is lower than −15 dB, and
the four arms of the crossed dipole are excited with a sequentially
the insertion loss (S21 = S31 ) is about −4.1 dB, representing that the
rotated phase feeding mechanism, which would result in a wider CP
feeding network has a transmission loss of around 1.1 dB; in addition,
operation bandwidth.
an isolation level of less than −20 dB is also found between the two
active ports. For the uncoupled ports, the output power (S41 = S51 )
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS is suppressed to −25 dB at least, suggesting that a pure polarization
The prototypes of the crossed dipole and the feeding network would be obtained as the crossed dipole is excited with the feeding
were, respectively, constructed. The photographs of the completed network.
prototypes are exhibited in Fig. 5. For measuring the S-parameters After the two prototypes were, respectively, confirmed to have
of the stand-alone crossed-dipole antenna, a bias tee is required, and acceptable performances, they were connected together via four
the obtained results are shown in Fig. 6 for the case that Port A cables. The insertion phases of these cables were tested in advance
and Port C are set to be active. The experimental data indicate that to make sure that Cable #B4, that is the semirigid cable in Fig. 5(c),
the two active ports have almost the same impedance bandwidths, has a leading phase of 90° at 1.9 GHz as compared to the other

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO. 4, APRIL 2018 2093

TABLE I
S ETTING OF DC V OLTAGE S OURCES AND THE E XCITED P OLARIZATION C OMPONENTS OF THE C ROSSED D IPOLE FOR THE F OUR O PERATION M ODES

Fig. 7. Measured S-parameters of the feeding network.

Fig. 9. Measured radiation patterns of the integrated antenna at 1.9 GHz.

(a) +45° LP mode. (b) −45° LP mode. (c) RHCP mode. (d) LHCP mode.

Fig. 8. Measured return loss of the integrated antenna.

cables (RG316). For the integrated antenna, the return loss measured
at the input port of the feeding network is shown in Fig. 8. The
results illustrate that the return loss in the frequency band from 1.6 to
2.3 GHz always stays below 10 dB while the antenna polarization
is switched among the four modes. Within the 10 dB-return-loss
impedance bandwidth, the reconfigurable antenna can give stable
radiation patterns for each polarization mode, and typical results,
measured at 1.9 GHz, are plotted in Fig. 9. All of the radiation
patterns are unidirectional and they have low cross polarization.
Because of antenna symmetry, the half-power beamwidths of the Fig. 10. Measured axial ratio and XPL of the integrated antenna.
main beams in the xz and yz planes are nearly the same. The
variations of the cross polarization on z-axis against frequency are bandwidth are, respectively, 7.1 dBi and 7 dBic. The simulated gain of
also inspected, and the experimental results are presented in Fig. 10. the example antenna studied in Section II is also given in Fig. 11 for
Observing the results, it is found that the XPL of the LP mode is comparisons, and it is about 1.6 dB higher than the measured gains
lower than −20 dB from 1.55 to 2.3 GHz, and the axial ratio of the of the integrated antenna. The difference is mainly due to the loss of
CP mode is smaller than 3 dB from 1.6 to 2.3 GHz. Consequently, the feeding network and the connecting cables. Also, the efficiency
the antenna can well perform the full polarization switching in an of the polarization reconfigurable antenna is calculated according to
operation bandwidth of about 35.9%. The gain variations of the the simulated directivity of the example antenna, and the results are
reconfigurable antenna operating in the +45° LP mode and the RHCP exhibited in Fig. 11. The average efficiency is about 62% within the
mode are shown in Fig. 11. The average gains within the operation operation bandwidth.

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2094
Fig. 11. Measured gain and efficiency of the integrated antenna.
V. C ONCLUSION
A design for an antenna with quad-polarization diversity has
been presented. The polarization reconfigurable antenna is realized
by integrating a four-port crossed dipole with a feeding network.
The experimental results prove that the reconfigurable antenna can
give an XPL of less than −20 dB for ±45° LP modes and an
axial ratio of smaller than 3 dB for two orthogonal CP modes.
In addition, the radiation patterns have symmetrical main beams
because the four arms of the crossed dipole are evenly excited for
each polarization mode. The available operation bandwidth of the
reconfigurable antenna is up to 36%. The cost is that the antenna
efficiency is somewhat decreased to 62%.
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