A Novel Defect Ground Structure For Decoupling Closely Spaced E-Plane Microstrip Antenna Array

In this paper, a novel decoupling technique for closely spaced E-plane patch antennas using defect ground structure (DGS) is proposed. The electric field coupling between the antennas is suppressed by etching DGS which consists of a pair of rectangular slots and four stubs on the ground plane. Moreover, unlike the other methods, the DGS is not etched in the middle of the antennas but loaded along the outer edge of the radiated patch. Thus, through the adopted technology the distance between the antenna elements is reduced and the isolation is increased. To validate the improvements by adopting the proposed technology, the array with DGS loading has been fabricated and then measured. The measurement results show that designed antennas have 95 MHz 10-dB impedance bandwidth, which is 25 MHz higher than that of the antenna without DGS. More importantly, isolation improvements have been increased from 8.5 to 31.3 dB by using the decoupling technique when the antennas are placed with a 0.032 lambda(0) edge-to-edge distance, where lambda(0) is the free-space wavelength. Therefore, this technique can be widely applied to improve isolation in a compact and low profile antenna system.