Low-Profile and Wider-Angle Beam Tilting Parasitic Array Resonator Antenna with Optimized Deflected Ground Plane on FR-4 Substrate.

A low-profile and wide-angle radiation pattern reconfigurable antenna is designed, analyzed, and fabricated for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, which operate at a 2.5-GHz frequency. This work aims to minimize the number of switches and optimize the parasitic size and ground plane to achieve a steering angle of more than 30° using a low cost-high loss FR-4 substrate. The radiation pattern reconfigurability is achieved by introducing four parasitic elements surrounding a driven element. In this work, the single driven element is fed by a coaxial feed, while other parasitic elements are integrated with the RF switches on the FR-4 as the substrate with dimensions of 150 × 100 mm (1.67 × 2.5 λo). The RF switches of the parasitic elements are surface mounted on the substrate. By truncating and modifying the ground plane, the beam steering can be achieved at more than 30° on the xz plane. Additionally, the proposed antenna can attain an average tilt angle of more than 10° on the yz plane. The antenna is also capable of attaining other important results, such as a fractional bandwidth of 4% at 2.5 GHz and an average gain of 2.3 dBi for all configurations. By adopting the ON/OFF condition on the embedded RF switches, the beam steering can be controlled at a certain angle, thus increasing the tilting angle of the wireless sensor networks. With such a good performance, the proposed antenna has high potential to serve as a base station in WSN applications.

Optically Transparent Tri-Wideband Mosaic Frequency Selective Surface with Low Cross-Polarisation.

Acquiring an optically transparent feature on the wideband frequency selective surface (FSS), particularly for smart city applications (building window and transportation services) and vehicle windows, is a challenging task. Hence, this study assessed the performance of optically transparent mosaic frequency selective surfaces (MFSS) with a conductive metallic element unit cell that integrated Koch fractal and double hexagonal loop fabricated on a polycarbonate substrate. The opaque and transparent features of the MFSS were studied. While the study on opaque MFSS revealed the advantage of having wideband responses, the study on transparent MFSS was performed to determine the optical transparency application with wideband feature. To comprehend the MFSS design, the evolutionary influence of the unit cell on the performance of MFSS was investigated and discussed thoroughly in this paper. Both the opaque and transparent MFSS yielded wideband bandstop and bandpass responses with low cross-polarisation (-37 dB), whereas the angular stability was limited to only 25°. The transparent MFSS displayed high-level transparency exceeding 70%. Both the simulated and measured performance comparison exhibited good correlation for both opaque and transparent MFSS. The proposed transparent MFSS with wideband frequency response and low cross-polarisation features signified a promising filtering potential in multiple applications.