A new approach for the gain enhancement and wideband radar cross section (RCS) reduction of an antenna based on the chessboard polarization conversion metasurfaces (CPCMs) is proposed. Compared with the previous low-RCS antennas, high gain and wideband low RCS of a circularly polarized (CP) antenna are achieved simultaneously. The proposed CPCM is the chessboard configuration of the polarization conversion metasurfaces (PCMs), which is made up of adjoining two-layer substrates with three metallic patterns. Low RCS is realized by 180° (±30°) reflection phase variations between two neighboring PCMs. Gain enhancement is achieved by employing a Fabry-Perot cavity, which is constructed by the PCM and the ground of the antenna. The antenna with CPCM operating at the $X$ -band, excited by a sequentially rotated feeding network, is fabricated and measured. Simulated and measured results show that the left-hand CP gain of the antenna with CPCM is at least 3 dB higher than that of the reference antenna from 8.5 to 9.5 GHz and the monostatic RCS is effectively reduced from 6 to 14 GHz.

This letter presents a novel compact dual-band dual-polarized antenna with filtering structures for Sub-6 GHz base station applications. It is operating at the LTE (2500-2690 MHz) and Sub-6 GHz of 5G (3300-3600 MHz) bands, where the center frequency of upper-band (UB) is 1.32 times of lower-band (LB). Mutual coupling between LB and UB is suppressed by the introduction of the filtering stubs near the feeding lines. A sufficiently high isolation between LB and UB (>25 dB) is also obtained. The size of the proposed antenna is only 0.43 λ ₁ × 0.43 λ ₁ × 0.26 λ ₁ (λ ₁ is the free-wavelength at 2.6 GHz). The half power beam widths are 650 ± 50 over both bands at horizontal planes. A four-element array, which consists of four hybrid antennas (the UB element is nested in the LB element) with a small array width (only 105 mm) is also studied. The proposed antenna and its array are suitable for wireless communication applications.

An ultra-wideband polarization rotation reflective surface (PRRS) with a high polarization conversion ratio (PCR) is proposed, which can reflect a linearly polarized incident wave with 90° polarization rotation. The unit cell of the proposed PRRS consists of a square and L-shaped patches printed on a substrate, which is covered by a superstrate and backed by a metallic ground. The two patches are connected to the ground using two metallic vias, respectively. Compared with the previously reported PRRS, the polarization rotation bandwidth of the proposed PRRS is enhanced from 49% to 97% with a high PCR of 96%. The frequency responses within the operation frequency band are consistent under oblique incident waves. Furthermore, the designed PRRS is applied to the ultra-wideband radar cross-section (RCS) reduction by forming a checkerboard surface. A 10-dB RCS reduction is achieved over an ultra-wideband of 98%. To validate the simulation results, a prototype of the checkerboard surface is fabricated and measured. A good agreement between the experimental and simulation results is obtained.

A low-profile horizontally polarized (HP) omnidirectional metasurface-inspired antenna is presented. To realize HP omnidirectional radiation pattern, the theory of characteristic mode is utilized to facilitate the analysis of three antenna structures. Then, by properly exciting the desired characteristic mode, the antenna with a wide bandwidth and good omnidirectionality, which is based on the modification of the standard patch antenna, is obtained. The simulated results show that the proposed antenna not only can obtain a low profile of 0.06λ0 (where λ0 is the free-space wavelength at 5.2 GHz), but also has a wide operating bandwidth of 16.6%. Finally, the metasurface-inspired antenna is manufactured and the error analysis between the simulated and measured results is also provided. The antenna can be applied to 5G wireless local area network systems.

A reconfigurable antenna with radiation pattern and polarization reconfiguration capabilities is investigated in this paper. The antenna consists of a central dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) and two parasitic DRAs made of a liquid solution with low dielectric loss. Utilizing the flowing of liquid, the existing of parasitic DRA can be changed to produce different patterns. An omnidirectional pattern can be realized when only the central DRA radiates, while a unidirectional pattern can be obtained using the parasitic DRAs. Furthermore, the polarization of the antenna with unidirectional radiation can be changed by forming different parasitic DRAs, which can be realized via liquid flowing. Based on this principle, three different radiation states, namely, omnidirectional radiation and unidirectional radiation with x- or y-polarization, can be obtained. To verify the design, a prototype of the antenna operating at 2.4 GHz was simulated, fabricated, and measured. The measurement results indicate that the antenna provides effective impedance matching over the band of interest as well as radiation pattern and polarization reconfiguration capabilities.

In this paper, a compact building block composed of a slot antenna and a loop antenna is proposed. The slot antenna and the loop antenna share a rectangular clearance, which improves the compactness of the building block effectively. Although the slot and the loop have overlapped completely, the proposed building block exhibits good isolation (better than 19 dB) without any external decoupling structure. Four such building blocks are used to implement a compact eight-port multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array operating at 3.5 GHz band (3.4-3.6 GHz) for fifth-generation (5G) metal-rimmed smartphone applications. The proposed eight-antenna MIMO array exhibits good isolation of better than 16 dB across the whole operating band. The measured efficiencies of the proposed MIMO array were between 59% and 73%, and its corresponding measured envelope correlation coefficients (ECCs) were better than 0.05. Furthermore, the calculated channel capacity of the proposed MIMO array with 20 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was about 38.2-39.8 bps/Hz across the desired bands (3.4-3.6 GHz). The measured results confirm that the proposed MIMO array is a good candidate for 5G terminals.