Design of a Wideband Dual-Polarized Stacked Antenna Array for SATCOM Applications

In this contribution, we present a dual-polarized stacked-patch antenna for mobile satellite communication (SAT-COM) applications in the Ku-band. The proposed antenna has been designed to cover the entire Rx/Tx Ku-band frequency range, namely from 10.7 GHz to 14.5 GHz. Dual polarization has been achieved by exploiting two different feeding lines, one for each polarization. After the design of the single radiating element, a $2\times 2$ array has been also studied and simulated. The array is fed through an impedance matching network realized by exploiting wideband T-junctions composed of a cascade of quarter-wave transformers. The results show high impedance matching over the entire operating bandwidth $(\vert S_{11}\vert < -20\ \mathbf{dB}$ for the single element and < -15 dB for the array), high cross-polarization rejection for both vertical and horizontal polarizations (> 38 dB at broadside), and finally high isolation between the two feeding networks (> 30 dB).