A low‐cost variable polarization reflectarray based on controllable wave‐path difference

Abstract

A variable polarization reflectarray antenna is investigated in this communication. It consists of the dual‐layer three parallel dipole loops (TPDLs) to independently control the reflected spatial compensative phase and the phase difference of two orthogonal LP components. In this case, the proposed variable polarization reflectarray can transform a linear polarization (LP) mode into an arbitrary polarization mode by simply rotating the feeder and adjusting the wave‐path difference between the dual‐layer TPDL. A detailed operating mechanism of the variable polarization is introduced in this work. As an example, a 13 × 13‐element offset reflectarray is designed, fabricated, and measured. Four different polarization states of right‐hand circularly polarized (RHCP), 45°LP, left‐hand CP (LHCP), and 135°LP are measured and validated with a specific incident LP wave. The measured gains of 22 dB and 1.5‐dB gain bandwidths of 11% are achieved for all the states. This new reflectarray antenna is especially useful for low‐cost variable polarization applications.