A Broadband, Dual-polarized Magneto-electric Dipole Phased Array with Equal Gain in Both E- and H-plane Scanning

A broadband dual-polarized (DP) phased-array antenna composed of magneto-electric (ME) dipole elements is presented in this paper. Since the ME dipole antenna works by exciting an electric and a magneto dipole, which have complementary types of radiation characteristics orientated at right angles to one another. Hence, the ME-dipole antenna should have symmetric radiation patterns in E- and H-plane and the array should also have almost equal gain at equal beam pointing angle, when scanning in E- and H-plane, theoretically. To verify the above theory, a 12-element linear array prototype working from 5 to 7.5 GHz (40% bandwidth) was designed and simulated. The E-plane and H-plane scanning performance of the array are carried out by changing the polarization mode. Simulated results show that the designed phased array has a good wide-angle scanning performance, which has VSWR ≤ 3 while scanning to ±60° in E- and H-plane and VSWR <2, while scanning broadside. Meanwhile, the array has almost equal gain (the difference of the realized gain<1.5dB) when scanning in E- and H-plane.