Light-weight base station antenna with artificial wire medium lens

The authors study the possibility of utilising a loaded wire medium as an artificial material for a beam shaping element in base station antenna applications. The wires in the lattice are loaded with a proper capacitive impedance to produce a structure effectively operating as a dielectric lens at the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) frequency range. It is proven with full-wave simulations that the interpretation of a finite-size wire lattice as a dielectric lens is physically sound, even with a moderate number of lattice periods. A prototype having a mechanically reconfigurable beamwidth is constructed and measured. It is shown that very promising performance can be achieved with a rather simple structure and a cheap manufacturing process.