Abstract
Future small satellites require the development of reconfigurable
antennas. Designing such antennas, especially single port patch antennas
with circular polarization (CP) is a challenging task. Therefore, we
propose both right-hand/left- hand circularly polarized (RHCP/LHCP)
antenna which can reconfigure. The proposed antenna follows patch
topology with E-shape that is single-layer and single-feed with two RF
switches. The switches can alter the polarization in real-time. We also
show various properties of the proposed antenna, such as radiation
pattern, impedance matching, axial ratio, and bandwidth through
simulations and measurements. The proposed model shows excellent
performance and agrees well with the measurements. The performance of
the antenna shows an effective bandwidth of 2.45 GHz to 2.82 GHz with a
maximum gain of 9.88 dB at 2.55 GHz. The symmetry of the antenna
radiation is preserved by switching between the LHCP and RHCP
polarization modes.