Triple-band compact circularly polarised stacked microstrip antenna over reactive impedance meta-surface for GPS applications

In this study, a compact, triple-band, circularly polarised stacked microstrip antenna is proposed over the artificial eta-surface called reactive impedance surface (RIS) for enhancing antenna radiation efficiency for GPS applications. The proposed design utilises the concept of combining multi-stacked patches with RIS as imaginary-impedance metamaterial-ground-plane for selective frequency reduction of lower bands with improvement in antenna radiation properties for multi-band applications. The circularly polarised (CP) radiation with compact antenna size is achieved for triple-band GPS frequencies of L1 (1.575 GHz), L2 (1.227 GHz) and L5 (1.176 GHz) by placing three stacked patches with two different pairs of symmetric slits, four different sized symmetric cross-shaped slots and truncated corners over RIS. As RIS meta-surface reduces the wave penetration through the lossy substrate beneath it, the proposed stacked patch antenna over RIS demonstrates enhanced forward gain with suppressed back radiation. The measured results for antenna prototype are (1.168-1.185 GHz): L5 band, (1.2-1.245 GHz): L2 band and (1.51-1.59 GHz): L1 band for 10 dB return loss bandwidth with good CP radiation. Forward (boresight) right-handed CP gain of 2.88 dBic (L5 band), 3.25 dBic (L2 band) and 5.53 dBic (L1 band) is observed for compact antenna overall volume of 0.32λ_o × 0.32λ_o × 0.024λ_o at 1.2 GHz.