IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

4, 2005 13

Dual-Band Circularly Polarized Microstrip Antenna

for Satellite Applications
F. Ferrero, C. Luxey, G. Jacquemod, and R. Staraj

Abstract—This letter presents a dual-band circularly polar-

ized patch antenna dedicated to satellite communications. The
dual-band behavior is obtained by inserting a small X-band mi-
crostrip patch antenna into a large L-band one. Both patches are
printed on the same substrate and fed by electromagnetic coupling
through two perpendicular slots etched in their ground planes.
These slots are fed by two different 90 microstrip branch-line
couplers printed on a stacked lower substrate. A prototype of the
antenna was realized with a 1.5-mm-thick upper layer substrate
and a 0.758-mm-thick feed layer substrate, both of the same
dielectric material with a relative permittivity of r = 2 22.
Simulation and measurement results are presented, showing this
compact dual-band antenna achieves the required Meteosat spec-
ifications in terms of frequency bandwidth, circular polarization
bandwidth, and isolation between the two communication bands.
Index Terms—Circular polarization, dual-band antennas, hy-
brid branch-line couplers, microstrip patch antennas, satellite
communications.

I. INTRODUCTION

C IRCULAR polarization (CP) has been extensively used in

satellite communications. In scientific papers, many dif-
ferent solutions are reported to generate CP. Degenerated mode
patch antennas are usually very compact structures due to their
simple feed but they exhibit very limited bandwidths [1]. An-
tenna arrays with sequentially rotated patches have a very good
axial ratio over a large frequency bandwidth in their broadside
direction, at the expense of a large antenna size, poor copolar
gain and high cross-polarization lobes in the diagonal planes
[2]. Printed antennas fed by hybrid branch-line couplers are a
tradeoff between the two former methods in terms of size, axial
ratio, and frequency bandwidth [3]. Moreover, they allow to Fig. 1. Geometry of the CP dual-band antenna. (a) Multi-layer view of the
antenna (Wp1 = 53:3 mm, Wp2 = 10:8 mm, Ls1 = 34 mm, Ws1 =
choose right-hand (RH) or left-hand CP sense by feeding the 1:1 mm, Ls2 = 8:4 mm, Ws2 = 0:4 mm). (b) Top view of the antenna.
appropriate hybrid’s port [4]. Since satellite links may be estab-
lished at different frequencies, there is currently a demand for same upper substrate and electromagnetically fed through two
CP multiband receiving antenna. In this way, a dual-band CP an- perpendicular slots etched in their ground planes. A good cov-
tenna was recently presented in [5] with a very compact size but erage of the two frequency bandwidths is obtained by feeding
having less than 1% voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) band- these slots by two different 90 microstrip branch-line couplers
width due to its degenerated mode operation. In this paper, we on a stacked lower substrate. The antenna can be positioned
present a dual-band CP patch antenna based on the branch-line at the focal point of a parabolic reflector [6] to simultaneously
coupler feeding technique. The compactness of the dual-band work in the L and X bands for Meteosat satellite communica-
antenna is obtained by inserting a small high-frequency patch tions.
into a large low-frequency one. Both patches are printed on the
II. ANTENNA DESIGN
Manuscript received October 15, 2004; revised November 10, 2004. This
work was supported by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, France, and Data A two step procedure was used to design the dual-band ra-
Tools Products, France. diator. The first step, not shown here, was to separately design
The authors are with the Laboratoire d’Electronique, Antennes et Télécom- and test the two antennas. The second was to carefully associate
munications, CNRS UMR6071, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, 06560
Valbonne, France (e-mail: ferrero@unice.fr). them on the same substrate. All simulations were performed
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2004.841622 with the help of the Agilent Momentum planar electromagnetic
1536-1225/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
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 14
Fig. 2. Measured and simulated VSWRs versus frequency. (a) L band.
(b) X band.
solver [7]. Fig. 1(a) and (b) shows that both low- and high-fre-
quency antennas are fed by the same technique described in [4].
A patch antenna is printed on a first substrate and fed by two or-
thogonal slots etched in its ground plane. These slots are elec-
tromagnetically coupled with the two outputs of a microstrip
quadrature hybrid circuit printed on a lower substrate. Two or-
thogonal modes of the patch are then excited with a 90 phase
difference resulting in CP radiated waves with a wide axial ratio
bandwidth only limited by the resonant nature of the microstrip
antenna. Another advantage of this feeding structure lies in that
it allows to choose the CP sense by simply changing which cou-
pler’s input is fed. To anticipate the future association of the
two antennas, the slots were positioned under the edges of the
patch and the tuning stubs of the low-frequency coupler were
bent to reduce the occupied space under the patch. Special care
was also given to the design of the high-frequency hybrid to
avoid unwanted coupling effects between its output branches.
The second step was to combine the two antennas on the same
upper substrate in a compact way. To achieve this result, we
enclosed the small high-frequency patch in the large one. The
planar electromagnetic software was used to lay out the spacing
gap between the patches [Fig. 1(b)] without generating pro-
hibitive coupling effects. During this operation, the dimensions
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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 4, 2005
Fig. 3. Axial ratio and Gain versus frequency. (a) L band. (b) X band.
of the enclosed patch were kept constant while modifying those
of the large antenna. Increasing the gap from 1.8 mm to 3.8 mm
gives a 4% decrease of the working frequency of the large patch
without altering those of the enclosed patch. This effect can be
explained by the square slot loop separating the two patches: the
surface currents of the large patch are forced to curve around this
slot. As soon as the gap increases, the slot loop becomes larger
and the length paths of the surface currents naturally increase,
which in turn causes a decrease of the working frequency of the
L-band antenna. Finally, in the optimized structure, the spacing
gap was fixed to 1.82 mm by reducing the length of the larger
patch by 6% compared to the length of the same patch radiating
alone.
III. THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
To verify the theoretical predictions, a prototype was real-
ized with a 1.5-mm-thick substrate as the upper layer and a
0.758-mm-thick substrate as the feed layer, both of the same
material with a relative permittivity of . The required
Meteosat specifications in terms of bandwidth are 1.698–1.709
GHz for the L band (0.65%), and 8–8.4 GHz for the X band
(4.9%). The simulated and measured VSWRs for the two bands
are shown in Fig. 2(a) and (b). Good agreement is found be-
tween predicted and experimental results except a small fre-
quency shift probably due to the tolerance’s fabrication errors.
 FERRERO et al.: DUAL-BAND CIRCULARLY POLARIZED MICROSTRIP ANTENNA FOR SATELLITE APPLICATIONS 15

a minimum of 0.1 dB slightly offset from the broadside direc-

tion of the antenna. At the upper frequency, the angular region
with an axial ratio better than 2 dB is with
a minimum of 0.9 dB. The measured isolation between the two
antennas is better than 30 dB, allowing simultaneous dual-band
operations [5]. However, for general purpose, one limiting factor
of our structure is that very close CP frequency bands cannot be
implemented because the two hybrid couplers would have to be
very close to each other leading to strong prohibitive coupling
effects.

IV. CONCLUSION
A compact CP dual-band antenna was successfully designed
for Meteosat satellite L and X communication bands. The dual-
band antenna was obtained by inserting a small patch into a large
one. A good coverage of the two frequency bandwidths was
achieved by using two hybrid branch-line couplers on a lower
substrate. The measured performances are as good as those ob-
tained with similar CP single-band antennas fed by a branch-line
coupler. The proposed solution is a good tradeoff between size
and performances because two CP frequency bands are covered
with the same antenna volume generally used for CP single-
band operation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the anonymous re-
viewers for their helpful and valuable remarks that led to the
re-evaluation of this work.

Fig. 4. Measured CP radiation patterns of the antenna. (a) f = 1:7 GHz,
(b) f = 8:2 GHz.
The measured bandwidths for a VSWR less than 2.0 are about
1.5% (30 MHz) at 1.7 GHz and 8.64% (700 MHz) at 8.1 GHz
thus satisfying the two Meteosat bandwidth goals. CP axial ra-
tios in broadside direction are presented in Fig. 3(a) and (b).
3 dB axial ratio bandwidths are 3.8% (65 MHz) in the L band
and 7.4% (600 MHz) in the X band. The measured maximum
gains in the normal direction of the antenna are also presented
on these figures: there are always above 5 dBi in both bands.
The x-z plane RHCP far-field radiation pattern measurements
are shown in Fig. 4(a) at 1.7 GHz and Fig. 4(b) at 8.2 GHz. At
the lower frequency, an acceptable axial ratio better than 2 dB
is found within the angular region of with
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