Capacitor-based reconfigurable beam and polarization of square patch antenna for WLAN application

This paper presents the investigation of square patch antenna with reconfigurable beam and polarization for wireless local area network (WLAN) application. The reconfigurable beam and polarization characteristic can be generated by controlling the phase of antenna radiation pattern caused by inserting capacitor on its feeding line. Here, a square patch antenna is applied with double-feeding method in vertical and horizontal directions to obtain dual polarization and phase difference of 90°. The simulation results show that the antenna with a capacitor inserted at one branch of feeding lines has reflection coefficient (S11) value less than -10dB at frequency of 2.42GHz. The used capacitance value is varied by 1pF, 3pF and 10pF for achieving beam direction change and polarization. In addition, the effect of varied capacitance value used for obtaining reconfigurable beam and polarization is discussed further.