Polarization Diversity via Reconfigurable Cusp Antenna

A novel reconfigurable antenna is presented in this paper. The antenna is capable of radiating either linear, left-hand circular, or right-hand circular polarization depending on the status of two switches. It has a radiating slot of the "cusp" shape. This slot supports two orthogonal magnetic current modes. Two perturbations are introduced at selected locations in the slot. The selective shorting of these perturbations allows us to control the excitation of the two current modes and consequently to control the polarization sense. The proposed antenna has been characterized rigoursly using a reliable full-wave simulator. The presented results include the return loss and radiation patterns of the antenna in its two modes of operation.