The Compact Circularly-Polarized Hollow Rectangular Dielectric Resonator Antenna With an Underlaid Quadrature Coupler

The wideband circularly polarized (CP) dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is investigated with an underlaid quadrature coupler. The idea is used to realize a CP hollow rectangular DRA. Since the coupler is located beneath the DRA, it does not increase the footprint of the antenna, making the system very compact. The underlaid coupler is placed entirely inside the hollow region of the DRA and, thus, it can be designed easily as if there is no overlaid DRA. Two configurations are considered in this paper. In the first configuration, an external 50-Ω load is used for the matching port of the coupler. For the second one, a strip loaded by the DRA is used to provide a load and, thus, no lumped elements are required in this configuration. In this paper, a network model is also given to aid engineers in designing the proposed integrated DRA. The reflection coefficient, axial ratio, antenna gain, and radiation pattern for each configuration are studied. It was found that wide impedance and axial-ratio bandwidths can be obtained with the proposed CP DRAs. Measurements were carried out to verify the simulations, and reasonable agreement between them was obtained.