Reduction of the excitation of surface and lateral waves by microstrip patch antennas

Summary form only given. During the last few years a new class of microstrip patch antennas has been developed. These microstrip antennas produce only a small amount of surface wave excitation and are referred to as reduced surface wave (RSW) antennas. The authors summarize their studies of patch antennas that have reduced surface and lateral wave excitation. They discuss a variety of structures that yield good RSW performance, and introduce a general method for constructing RSW antennas of arbitrary shape. Numerical results from the theoretical analyses of these antennas, along with supporting experimental results, are presented. These results include input impedance, bandwidth, radiation patterns, and mutual coupling. The results verify that extremely low surface-wave and lateral-wave excitation can be achieved with these designs, resulting in negligible diffraction of the surface and lateral waves from the support structure and very small mutual coupling between elements. In addition, they demonstrate techniques for designing dual-band and circularly polarized RSW antennas.