Design of wideband polarization diversity antenna with conical radiation pattern

A novel wideband polarization diversity antenna that is capable of exciting two orthogonal conical radiation patterns is presented. The antenna consists of four magneto-electric dipoles arranged in a ring configuration above a ground plane and a vertical electric monopole at the center of the ground plane. A matching network is used to combine the signals from the four magneto-electric dipoles to produce one conical mode with horizontal polarization. The electric monopole is used to generate a conical beam with vertical polarization in electric feed. A prototype operated at around 2.4GHz was constructed and tested. Experimentally, the antenna exhibits about 22.2% overlapped bandwidth of the two ports. Two orthogonal conical modes can achieved average gain of 6dBi and 5dBi respectively. The measured isolations between two ports is less than -38dB within the overlapped bandwidth.