A low-cost electrical beam tilting base station antennas for wireless communication system

A multifunctional feeding network is presented in this paper. It contains a one-to-eight Wilkinson-based power divider and eight microstrip lines backed with slot array. In addition, the moveable card printed with seven metal strips serves as a novel phase shifter. By dynamically moving the card, we can adjust the number and shielding area of the slot array and then alter the distribution of phase angle at each port of the feeding network accordingly. For example, in our application, we can have a progressive phase difference between the ports of feeding network and dynamically adjust them by changing the degree of perturbation on the slots array. The characteristic of beam tilting has been carefully examined by measuring the phase angle at each port and also by the far-field radiation pattern of the patch antenna array integrated with this novel phase shifter, in various perturbation conditions. The reliable, easily fabricated, and low-cost characteristics show its potential applications in the base-station antenna design.