Design of A Novel Single-feed Antenna for Global

Positioning System
Long Xiao, Xian-Liang Wu, Bo Tong , Hong-Qing He Liang Zhang
Department of Electronics and Information Engineering Department of Electronics and Information Engineering
Anhui University Hefei Normal University
Hefei, China Hefei, China
[email protected],[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract This paper presents the design of a circularly ways are adopted to realize circular polarization. Common
polarized microstrip antenna for global positioning system (GPS). methods producing circular polarization are truncating corners
This single-feed and single-layer antenna works at the L1 (1559- [7-8], notching, opening slits, and adding tuning stubs [9-14].
1615MHZ) frequency band for civil use of GPS. There are two In [15], two pairs of square ring slots are etched along the
pairs of symmetric rectangular slots and circular slots in the diagonals of the patch to realize circular polarization, and via
diagonal directions respectively. The right-handed circular holes are used to realize miniaturization.
polarization (RHCP) is obtained by using the slight difference
between the rectangular and circular slots. Four E-shaped shots In this paper, the design of a microstrip antenna with
are embedded on the ground plane to improve the antenna gain. rectangular slots and circular slots along the diagonal directions
The results show that the antenna gain has increased some to realize circular polarization is proposed. The circularly
0.83dB. The -10dB impendence bandwidth is 39.3MHz and the polarized microstrip antenna is single-feed to be compact. By
3dB axial ratio is 14.9MHz. It is obvious that this antenna can be adjusting the dimensions of the slots, the two orthogonal modes
used in GPS. will be excited. The two modes have the phase difference of
90, thus forming the circular polarized wave. Due to the small
Keywordssingle-feed; circularly polarized (CP); axial ratio; antenna gain of about 0.15dB, four structures of E-shaped slots
bandwidth are etched on the ground plane in order to improve the gain of
antenna. The results show that after etching E-shaped slots, the
I. INTRODUCTION antenna gain has been greatly increased. It will be easier to
meet the needs of practical engineering applications.
Global positioning system (GPS) was built by the United
States. Nowadays, it is one of the most popular global
positioning and navigation systems and enjoys a large share of II. ANTENNA DESIGN
the market. The system is widely applied in navigation, The transmission line mode is adopted in this paper to
surveying, mapping, monitoring and communication fields. calculate the dimensions of the antenna patch. The patch and
Due to the increasing demands for GPS, the key is to solve the substrate are square with the relative dielectric constant of r,
problems of GPS receiver antenna technology. Microstrip thickness of H and the central frequency of fr. The length of
patch antennas [1-3] and quadrifilar helix antennas [4-6] are patch can be given by
generally adopted for GPS antenna. As the structure of
quadrifilar helix antenna is relatively complicated, it is not easy
to fabricate the antenna and the cost of fabrication is high. So 1
the antenna in this paper uses a microstrip patch antenna L 2* L 2* L (1)
2 2 f r reff u0 0
because of its ease of fabrication, low profile and low cost.
GPS antenna is right-handed circularly polarized. Circularly
polarized (CP) antenna can receive an arbitrarily polarized where is the free-space wavelength and the effective relative
wave and the wave of circularly polarized antenna can also be dielectric constant reff is given by
received by any arbitrarily polarized antenna. In view of these
characteristics, CP antennas are widely applied in navigation 1/ 2
systems. r 1 r 1 h
reff 1 12 (2)
Problems in the design of CP antenna are mainly feed 2 2 W
methods and ways of realization of circular polarization. Feed
methods of CP antennas are coaxial-probe feeder and
microstrip line feeder. Microstrip line feeder needs to consider 1 2 v0 2
more elements, which involve the quarter wavelength W (3)
2 f r 0 0 r 1 2 fr r 1
microstrip line. So the overall size of microstrip antenna will
increase. Single-feed CP antenna has more compact size
compared with the CP antenna fed by microstrip line. Many where 0 is the velocity of light in free space.

This paper is sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China

(No.06070464, No.06060483).
 The added length of the patch is given by

( reff +0.3)(W 0.264)

L h(0.412) h (4)
( reff 0.258)(W 0.8)
h

Geometry of the single-feed and single-layer microstrip

antenna is shown in Fig. 1. The dielectric substrate is FR4-
epoxy and the relative permittivity is r = 4.4, the thickness of
the substrate is H = 1.6 millimeters and the loss tangent is
tan= 0.02. The patch is fed by a 50 Ohm coaxial probe. Fig. 1
(a) is the top view of the antenna. The shaded part in the graph
is the patch. It can be seen from the graph that there are two
pairs of symmetric rectangular slots and circular slots along
two diagonals of the patch respectively. There is slight (c)
dimensional difference between the rectangular and circular
slots. By adjusting the size of them, two equal amplitude and
phase difference of 90 degrees of orthogonal degenerate mode Fig. 1. Geometry of the single-feed circularly polarized antenna for GPS: (a)
(TM10 and TM01) can be excited, resulting in the right- top view, (b) cross-sectional view, and (c) bottom view.
handed circular polarization (RHCP).
Fig. 1(b) presents the specific location of the etched E- III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
shaped slots on the ground. The four E-shaped slots are The antenna structure proposed in the paper was modeled
symmetric in orthogonal directions. As the loss angle of the and simulated in the simulation software HFSS3 13.0. And the
antenna is big, the E-shaped slots can be used to increase the material object was fabricated and can be seen in Fig. 2. In
antenna gain. Slots on the ground will change antenna anechoic chamber, the vector network analyzer E5071C was
inductance and capacitance value, thus producing resistance used to measure the printed circuit board. The simulation and
effects and greatly improving the antenna gain. measurement results are shown as below.
The initial value of L0 can be calculated by (1), (2), (3) and As can be seen from Fig. 3, the simulated -10dB
(4). By optimizing the parameters of the antenna shown in Fig. impedance bandwidth of the antenna is from 1.5642 to 1.6036
1, the overall dimensions areL= 70mm, L0= 43.5mm, L1= GHz (39.3 MHz). At center frequency (1.57542GHz) of L1
10.6mm, L2= 10.3mm, W2= 2.4mm, L3= 1mm, W3= 2mm, L4= for the GPS antenna, the value of reflection coefficient is -
35mm, W4= 2mm, r1= r2= 2.1mm. Center points of the circles 16.68dB. The spectrum covers the GPS L1 frequency band
are (-15,-15,0) and (15,15,0). and it is certain that the simulation results satisfy the
requirements. It can be seen that measurement results have
shifted compared with the simulation results, this is due to the
measurement results have been influenced by the parameter
error of medium plate, loss of SMA connector and
measurement environment. But it can be seen that the results
of measurement and simulation are in reasonable range of
error. Fig.4 is the simulation curve of axial ratio. It can be
seen that the 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth is 1.5665 to 1.5814
GHz (14.9 MHZ), the axial ratio is 1.8372 dB at 1.57542 GHz.
The antenna has realized the expected circular polarization.
Fig.5 has compared the gain results of ground plates with
and without the four E-shaped slots. It is obvious that the
antenna gain is small (0.1485dB) without four E-shaped slots
on the ground at 1.57542GHz. After etching the four slots, the
antenna gain has increased to 0.9579dB, which has increased
(a) by 0.8247dB. It can be concluded that the E-shaped slots can
increase the antenna gain greatly and this antenna is able to
meet the needs of practical projects.
Fig.6 presents the simulated normalized radiation patterns
at the center frequency of 1.57542GHz, Fig. 6 (a) and (b) are
results of RHCP and left-handed circular polarization (LHCP)
on the xz-plane and yz-plane respectively. As can be seen, the
(b) radiation intensity of RHCP is obviously much stronger than
that of LHCP radiation. The RHCP antenna gain is 20dB more
than LHCP antenna gain. The antenna shows good RHCP
performance at 1.57542GHz. The RHCP gain is about 0.9245
and the antenna has excellent front lobe characteristic, thus

(a) (b)

reaching to the actual request.

Fig. 2. Fabricated prototype of the proposed antenna: (a) top view and (b)
bottom view. Fig. 5. Comparison of antenna gain with/without the four E-shaped slots at the
frequency of 1.57542GHz.

Fig. 3. Simulated and measured reflection coefficients of the proposed GPS

antenna.
(a)

Fig. 4. Axial ratio of the proposed antenna.

(b)

Fig. 6. Normalized radiation patterns of the proposed antenna at

1.57542GHz: (a) xz-plane and (b) yz-plane.

IV. CONCLUSION
The paper proposes a CP antenna with symmetric
rectangular slots and circular slots along the diagonal
directions. In addition, the antenna gain has been greatly [7] P. C. Sharma and K. C. Gupta, Analysis and optimized design of
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