A Wideband Decoupled Monolithic Multielement Dielectric Patch Antenna Array With Steerable Beam

A simple wideband decoupling method for monolithic multielement dielectric patch (DP) antenna (DPA) array is presented in this letter. Thanks to the multimode of the DP resonator, the TM
₄₀
and TE
₄₂
modes, which can be viewed as four TM
₁₀
and four TE
₂₁
modes, are simultaneously excited in the monolithic DPA. The introduction of the air slots etched in the DP not only isolates the
E
-fields of the adjacent 1/4 TM
₄₀
(TM
₁₀
) or 1/4 TE
₄₂
(TE
₁₂
) modes simultaneously but also synchronously tunes the TM
₁₀
and TE
₁₂
modes so that the enhanced bandwidth can be maintained. Thus, the monolithic DPA can be regarded as a 1 × 4 wideband decoupled multielement DPA array for multiple-input–multiple-output application. For demonstration, a 1 × 4 monolithic wideband decoupled DPA array is fabricated and measured. The measured results show that the antenna array has the operation bandwidth of 4.92–5.83 GHz (16.9%). Within it, the isolations between the adjacent/nonadjacent elements are both better than 21.5 dB. And then the beam-steering DPA array can support maximum ±46° beam scanning in the
E
-plane.