Steering capability of a mm-wave left-handed transmission line antenna

The paper presents the results concerning the radiation characteristic scanning of a ferrite supported mm-wave (30 GHz) Zeroth-Order Resonating (ZOR) CoPlanar Waveguide (CPW) antenna based on Composite Right/Left-Handed (CRLH) transmission lines. The scanning effect is obtained by magnetically polarizing the ferrite substrate. The measurements demonstrate steering of the radiation characteristic between approx. -15° to +14° depending on the strength of biasing magnetic field between 0 T and 0.265 T. Concerning the gain, in the unbiased state the antenna gain is 4.16 dBi and increases slightly to 4.22 dBi due to small field loss reduction followed by the application of the biasing magnetic field. Also, the return loss is reduced as a result of eliminating ferrite´s low field loss.