A broadband circularly polarized cavity-backed Archimedean spiral array antenna for C-band applications

In this letter, a new configuration of sequentially rotated circularly polarized (CP) array antenna with a modified gain is investigated. In order to realize the presented antenna, four Archimedean spiral radiators are applied on a substrate, backed by a circularly slotted ground plane. Also a combination of 180° rat-race coupler and 90° branch-line couplers prepare the employed feeding network in this study. Furthermore, cavity-backed structure is utilized to enhance the antenna gain and achieve a directional radiation pattern over the operating frequency band. This configuration also extends the return loss (RL) and the axial ratio (AR) bandwidths, simultaneously. According to the experimental results, the 2 × 2 CP array antenna has RL bandwidth of 64.28%, AR bandwidth of 54.28%, and peak gain of 10.84 dBic. The close correspondence between the measured and the simulated results validates the proposed design.