Performance Enhancement of Self-Polarizing Metallic EBG Antennas

This letter presents an original solution to solve the matching problem of the circularly self-polarizing electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) antennas. More precisely, a comprehensive method to design a self-polarizing EBG antenna will be detailed. This kind of antenna had been designed before, but it was very poorly matched. An iris-based matching system has been used here, which produced a satisfying return loss while deteriorating the axial ratio (AR). An original device will be introduced, which allowed us to compensate for this degradation. Finally, to validate this new structure, a 20-dBi antenna working around 9 GHz and showing an AR lower than 1 dB over a 100-MHz bandwidth has been conceived, realized, and successfully measured.