A new architecture for a multi polarized, perpendicularly-fed, radiating element

Planar printed antennas are often required to be fed by parallel feed-networks, which, when printed on the same substrate as the radiating elements, create mutual coupling, spurious radiation and excite surface waves. This considerably affects the array efficiency. Numerous architectures were proposed in the past; some of them use the multilayer structure (which by itself exhibits low efficiency), or perpendicularly fed structures. The latter consist of a substrate for the radiating element and another substrate which for the feed-network. The paper reviews some of the basic configurations proposed until now, and shows the specific improvements introduced by the proposed architecture.