Microstrip Antennas With Suppressed Radiation in Horizontal Directions and Reduced Coupling.pdfVIP

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 53, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2005 3469 Microstrip Antennas With Suppressed Radiation in Horizontal Directions and Reduced Coupling ´ ´ Marija M. Nikolic, Antonije R. Djordjevic, and Arye Nehorai, Fellow, IEEE Abstract—Microstrip (patch) antennas usually strongly radiate coupling is reduced with increasing the separation between ad- in directions along the ground plane. This effect causes unwanted jacent antennas. It diminishes typically for 12 or 18 dB when radiation patterns and increased coupling among array elements. the distance between the antennas is doubled. Dielectric polarization currents are identified as physical sources of this radiation. A general technique is proposed to compensate The far-field coupling is due to the patch radiation in hori- these currents and suppress radiation in horizontal directions. zontal directions. This coupling diminishes for 6 dB when the distance between the antennas is doubled. This coupling can be Index Terms—Antenna array mutual coupling, antenna radia- tion patterns, microstrip antennas, microstrip arrays. efficiently reduced only if the antenna radiation in horizontal di- rections is suppressed. A patch antenna excites surface waves, which are guided by I. INTRODUCTION the substrate and the ground plane [5]. The surface-wave cou- ICROSTR