Volume 71, Issue 5-6 -

Based on conventional Wilkinson power divider, two compact multi-band equal power dividers (PDs) employing stub loaded stepped-impedance resonators with defected microstrip structure (SL-SIR-DMS) is proposed in this paper. The proposed SL-SIR-DMS is analyzed by even/odd mode method. It is found that different defected structures can lead to different frequency responses. In addition, by using DMS, tri-band and even quad-band responses can be easily achieved without increasing the resonator size. As verification, one tri-band equal PD and one quad-band one are fabricated. The predicted results on S parameters are compared with the measured ones and good agreement is found.

A novel compact Gysel power divider with up to 12th, harmonics suppression was proposed in this study. Incorporation of six similar low-pass filters into the conventional Gysel power divider is applied to this design. The proposed power divider reduces the occupied area to only 9 % of the conventional Gysel power divider at 625 MHz (91 % size reduction). A comprehensive comparison between the proposed design and other published studies substantiates the superiority of the proposed design in terms of circuit size and stop-band bandwidth. Furthermore, this design retains the high-power handling capability over the Wilkinson power divider.

A compact microstrip diplexer with a high isolation and improved out-of-band performance is proposed in this paper. The proposed diplexer is based on cascaded-quadruplet (CQ) bandpass filters (BPFs), which is composed of λ/4 stepped-impedance resonators (SIRs). By employing the edge and quasi-lumped coupling topology, a compact diplexer with improved passband selectivity can be achieved. Meanwhile, by appropriately adjusting the impedance and electric length ratios of SIRs, the stopband can be extended to 20 GHz with a rejection level of 10 dB, which is 12.7 times of the fundamental frequency. The predicted results on S parameters are compared with the measured ones and good agreement is achieved.

This paper proposes a quasi-elliptic bandpass filter-integrated single-pole double-throw (SPDT) switch. The series-parallel configuration of p-i-n diodes embedded into the impedance matching circuit is proposed to combine two quasi-elliptic response bandpass filters to constitute the proposed SPDT switch. To validate our design approach, a proposed quasi-elliptic bandpass filter-integrated SPDT switch is designed and fabricated with a central frequency of 1.25 GHz and a 3 dB fractional bandwidth of 16 %. Low insertion loss in the on state and good isolation in the off state are achieved. The switch size including bias circuits but excluding feeding lines is 0.447λ g ×0.134λ g .

In this paper, a new broadband matching network design approach based on reflection modeling is proposed, which has two parts: impedance data generation and modeling. In the approach, firstly the output impedance data of the matching network is obtained to get the desired flat transducer power gain in the passband. Next the output reflection data are calculated using the obtained impedance data, then they are modeled as a bounded real function. Then this function is synthesized and the desired lossless matching network with initial element values is obtained. A double matching example is solved to illustrate the use of the proposed approach. It is seen that proposed approach provides suitable initials for CAD tools for final trimming.

In this paper, an electromagnetic band gap cavity antenna with improved radiation and impedance bandwidths is presented. The proposed antenna is constructed by placing a triple-layer heterogeneous printed-unprinted partially reflective surface (PRS) above a primary aperture-coupled patch antenna. The PRS unit-cell provides a positive gradient reflection phase behavior over the desired frequency range. A prototype antenna is fabricated and measured that highlighted its ability to achieve 3-dB gain bandwidth of about 35.9 %, from 7.93 GHz to 11.4 GHz, with a peak gain of 14.25 dBi at 8.5 GHz. In addition, the impedance bandwidth is 40.32 %, from 7.9 GHz to 11.89 GHz. Thus, the designed antenna outperforms many other competitors for improving the radiation bandwidth of planar antennas with the same presented concept.

In this paper, the tapered slot antenna (TSA) with corrugation is proposed for UWB applications. The multi-section binomial transformer is used to design taper profile of the proposed TSA that does not involve using time consuming optimization. A step-by-step procedure for synthesis of the step impedance values related with step slot widths of taper profile is presented. The smooth taper can be achieved by fitting the smoothing curve to the entire step slot. The design of TSA based on this method yields results with a quite flat gain and wide impedance bandwidth covering UWB spectrum from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz. To further improve the radiation characteristics, the corrugation is added on the both edges of the proposed TSA. The effects of different corrugation shapes on the improvement of antenna gain and front-to-back ratio (F-to-B ratio) are investigated. To demonstrate the validity of the design, the prototypes of TSA without and with corrugation are fabricated and measured. The results show good agreement between simulation and measurement.

In this work, a pentagonal ring CPW-fed zeroth order resonating (ZOR) antenna with gain enhancement is proposed. Gain enhancement is achieved by means of electromagnetic bandgap structures (EBG) loaded on patch. The proposed antenna is operated in series resonant mode, therefore resonance frequency is dominated by series parameters of the conventional CRLH transmission line. The antenna comprises of a circular patch which is imposed by interdigital capacitor and EBG structures. Meandered line inductor is connected between patch and pentagonal ground plane in order to ensure miniaturization using CRLH resonant approach. Measurement results shows that proposed antenna offers ZOR resonance at 2.7 GHz with 4.81 %, 10 dB fractional bandwidth. The antenna offers simulated gain of 1.63 dBi and 80.6 % radiation efficiency at ZOR frequency. Surface current distribution shows that how these CRLH – TL components responsible for origination of ZOR mode. Proposed antenna exhibits excellent radiation patterns with cross polarization level of −53 dB in the boresight direction.

A high-gain lens antenna employing single-layer focusing metasurface (MS) is proposed in this article. The single-layer element achieves a 360° transmission phase range with a transmission magnitude better than 0.9. And the focusing MS consists of 169 elements was designed by utilizing the technique of varying rotation angle to compensate the phase delay. Thus, a lens antenna is constructed by placing a circularly polarized (CP) patch antenna at the focal point of the MS. The fabricated lens antenna demonstrates a good performance of 4.6 % 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth and 6 % 1-dB gain bandwidth, respectively. Moreover, the maximum gain is 18.3 dBic at 15 GHz, which is enhanced by 11.4 dBic compared with the patch antenna. Due to the single-layer structure, this design has a low profile and easy fabrication process compared with the conventional designs, making it an attractive alternative to compact high-gain antenna.

In this letter, an eight-element Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system for LTE mobile handset applications is proposed. The antenna array consists of eight 3D inverted F-shaped antennas (3D-IFA), and the measured –10 dB impedance bandwidth is 3.2–3.9 GHz which can cover the LTE bands 42 and 43 (3.4–3.8 GHz). By controlling the rotation of the antenna elements, no less than 10 dB isolation between antenna elements can be obtained. After using the specially designed meandered slots on the ground as decoupling structures, the measured isolation can be further improved to higher than 13 dB between the antenna elements at the whole operating band.

A practical new type direct lightning shielding rod is designed to reduce the electromagnetic radiation produced by lightning stroking to Franklin lightning rod in the paper. The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is adopted for analyzing. It is the shielding layer that affects the electromagnetic fields and the insulating medium make no difference. All the electromagnetic fields amplitude obtained decrease for the shielding layer existing, regardless of any condition, but the extent is different. That is, the effect on the horizontal electric field is most noticeable, the vertical electric field comes second, minimum the azimuthal magnetic field. All the field components are affected by shielding layer height and the distance between shielding layer and lightning channel, but not significantly by the shielding layer grounding depth. The shielding effect is more obvious with lower ground conductivity, but the ground relative permittivity makes no difference.