A Broadband Dual Circularly Polarized Conical Four-Arm Sinuous Antenna

A novel wideband four-arm sinuous antenna with dual circular polarizations (CPs) and unidirectional radiation is proposed. Different from the conventional designs, this sinuous antenna is realized in a conical form and no ground plane or absorptive cavity is required to obtain unidirectional radiation. The beamforming network for dual circularly polarized operations consists of a wideband quadrature coupler and two wideband baluns, and an auxiliary feeding patch is introduced to facilitate the connection between baluns and sinuous arms. The design of baluns and coupler is inspired from the printed exponentially tapered microstrip balun and broadside-coupled microstrip coupler, respectively. The dynamic differential evolution algorithm is employed to optimize the geometry of coupler for optimal performance. For both polarizations, the presented antenna has wide impedance bandwidth, good axial ratio, moderate realized gain, and front-to-back ratio within 2–5 GHz. An antenna prototype is fabricated and tested. The agreement between simulation and measurement results validates the proposed antenna framework. The demonstrated antenna has advantages of wide bandwidth, dual CPs, unidirectional radiation, lightweight, and low cost, and is promising for applications in wireless systems.