Novel design of compact microstrip lines fed wideband metallic contact annular stacked patch antenna for GNSS application

Abstract

A novel design of wideband metallic contact annular stacked patch antenna is presented for global navigation satellite system (GNSS) in this letter. The wideband characteristic is achieved by employing L-probe coupled feeding structure. The antenna is fed by four-output-ports feeding network composed of three normal Wilkinson power dividers. As a result, the antenna has an effective bandwidth of 54.8% from 1.1 to 1.93 GHz for VSWR< 2, and 42.9% from 1.1 to 1.7 GHz for AR < 3 dB respectively, which is sufficiently enough to operate for the satellite navigation frequencies including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and Compass(1100 MHz–1600 MHz). Metallic contact annular stacked patch is introduced in this design to obtain stable gain bandwidth, broad beam width and good axial ratio at low elevation. The final antenna provides very good circularly polarized radiation for GNSS.