Self-Decoupled Square Patch Antenna Arrays by Exciting and Using Mixed Electric/Magnetic Coupling Between Adjacent Radiators

This article presents and develops a simple decoupling method for the planar square patch antenna arrays by virtue of mixed electric and magnetic coupling property. Since the resonant modes of TM₁₀ and TM₀₁ are a pair of degenerate modes in the square patch radiator which are intrinsically orthogonal, a superposed mode of them can be generated to possess consistent field distributions along all the four sides of the patch by adjusting the feeding position. By employing such superposed mode, the mutual coupling between two horizontally adjacent patch elements will become identical to that between two vertical ones, indicating an expected possibility that the complex 2-D decoupling problem in a large-scale antenna patch array can be effectively facilitated and simplified to a 1-D one. Subsequently, metallic pins and connecting strip are properly loaded in each square patch resonator, such that appropriate electric and magnetic coupling strengths can be readily achieved and thus the mutual coupling can get highly decreased. A 1 × 2 antenna array with an edge-to-edge separation of 1 mm, which corresponding to 0.0117λ₀, is firstly discussed, simulated, and fabricated. The measured results show that the isolation can be highly improved from 4 dB to 17 dB across the entire passband. In final, 1 × 3, 2 × 2, and 4 × 4 antenna array prototypes are constructed and studied for verification of the expansibility and feasibility of the proposed decoupling method to both linear and 2-D antenna arrays.