This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been

fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/LAWP.2015.2446193, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
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Design of a Low-profile Dual-Polarized Stepped

Slot Antenna Array for Base Station
Ruina Lian, Zedong Wang, Yingzeng Yin, Jianjun Wu, and Xueyan Song


Abstract—In this letter, a microstrip-fed dual-polarized
stepped-impedance (SI) slot antenna element with a low profile is
firstly proposed. The antenna is composed of two pairs of SI slots
excited by two orthogonal stepped microstrip feedlines. The
broadband characteristic is achieved by combining the
fundamental and spurious resonances of the SI slot resonators,
while the good cross polarization is mainly due to the introduction
of the shorting pins. Secondly, based on the proposed antenna, a
four-element antenna array is designed, constructed and
measured for base-station applications. Measured results
demonstrate the bandwidths (return loss > 10 dB) of the antenna
array are 46.9% (1.55-2.5 GHz) and 38.7% (1.69-2.5 GHz) for
Port 1 and Port 2, respectively. The isolation between the two
ports is greater than 35 dB whereas the cross polarization level
maintains lower than -27 dB across the entire operating band. In
addition, the antenna array prototype achieves average gains of
13.5 dBi and 13.9 dBi for horizontal polarization and vertical
polarization, respectively.

Index Terms— Dual-polarized slot antenna, low profile, high

isolation, wide band, antenna array, stable gain.

I. INTRODUCTION

W ITH the significant advancement in modern mobile

communications, antennas with polarization diversity
are usually preferred in base-station applications due to their
remarkable abilities to increase the communication capacity
and combat multipath fading problem. To design a practical
dual-polarized antenna, wide operating band, high isolation and
low cross polarization are the major characteristics concerned.
Furthermore, antennas with low profile are highly desired since
miniaturization has been the leading trend.
In general, cross dipoles [1]-[3], as one classic antenna type,
are always applied to achieve dual polarizations. This kind of
antenna, indeed, has advantages of wide band, high isolation
and low cross polarization. However, all these dipole antennas
are born with high profiles of approximately a quarter of the
wavelength in free space at center operating frequency. The
other typical dual-polarized antenna class is the stacked patches
[4]-[6], consisting of more than one substrate, which are
frequently excited by the aperture coupling to obtain wide band
The authors are with the National Key Laboratory of Antennas and
Microwave Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
(e-mail:rnlian@163.com;zedongwang1989@163.com;yzyin@mail.xidian.edu
.cn; jun542391752@126.com; xysong@stu.xidian.edu.cn )
Fig. 1 Configuration and prototype of the proposed antenna.
and high isolation. In recent years, microstrip patch antennas
with novel feeding techniques such as electromagnetic-fed [7],
gap-coupled probes & aperture-coupled feeds [8], hook-shaped
probe [9], meandered strip & aperture-coupled feed [10] and
differential-feed [11] are unceasingly proposed. However, the
configurations of the antennas mentioned are somewhat of
intricacy and hence they are not appropriate elements to
construct antenna arrays for base-station applications.
Compared with the antennas above, slot antenna is a good
choice for antenna array since it has lots of merits like planar
feeding structure, wide operating band, high isolation, etc. As
shown in [12], a dual-polarized slot antenna with simple
microstrip feedlines is proposed, this antenna achieves wide
band and high isolation but poor cross polarization.
In this letter, inspired by the previous work of Jiang et al.
[13], a dual-polarized stepped-impedance (SI) slot antenna with
symmetrically unidirectional radiation is presented. The
proposed antenna achieves a wide band with a height of about

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/LAWP.2015.2446193, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
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Fig. 2 Measured and simulated S-parameters of the proposed antenna. Fig. 4 Measured and simulated radiation efficiencies for the proposed antenna.

0.15 λ0 (λ0 being the wavelength in free space at center
operating frequency). Meanwhile, high isolation and low cross
polarization can also be obtained across the entire operating
band. A four-element dual-polarized antenna array fed by two
simple power dividers is developed for base-station
applications. To validate the design concept, prototypes of the
antenna element and the antenna array are fabricated and
measured. Detailed discussions of the antenna element and the
array are presented as follows.
II. DESIGN OF DUAL-POLARIZED STEPPED SLOT ANTENNA
A. Antenna Element
Fig. 3 Measured radiation patterns at 2 GHz for both ports.
Fig. 1 shows the configuration of the proposed
dual-polarized antenna. It has overall dimensions of 69×69
mm2 and the substrate used is 1-mm-thick FR4 (εγ=4.4,
tanδ=0.02). The proposed antenna mainly consists of two
identical pairs of SI slots and two stepped microstrip feedlines.
Each pair of the slots is developed by two three-section SI
slotline resonators in parallel, which are kept symmetrical
along the diagonal line of the square patch. In the literature [14],
it has been theoretically demonstrated that the antenna with SI
slotline resonators features better ability to control spurious
frequency since both the length and the width of the individual
section of the SI slot affect the resonances. Here, for a
broadband dual-polarized antenna, the antenna adopts
three-section SI slots with different lengths and different widths.
Moreover, two orthogonal stepped microstrip feedlines printed
on the top layer of the substrate are employed to achieve
horizontal and vertical polarizations. For convenient excitation,
two narrow rectangular strips within the center square slot with
side length Xc extend to the end of the stepped microstrip
feedlines, where they electrically joint with each other by two
slender pins. To obtain unidirectional radiation, the proposed
antenna is placed 22 mm above a reflector with an area of
200×200 . accompanied with better impedance matching and higher
For a practical antenna array later, it is better to deploy two
dividers underneath the reflector. Therefore, coaxial lines with
the diameter of 4.4 mm are introduced to transfer signals from
the dividers to the microstrip feedlines. However, they
deteriorate the cross polarization and make the main beam
deviate from the broadside direction. Two corresponding short
pins with the diameter of 3.4 mm, which stretch from the
bottom patch to the reflector, are utilized to improve the poor
condition. In the design, the outer conductor of the coaxial line
is connected to the reflector and the square patch while its inner
pin is linked to the microstrip feedline. The antenna is analyzed
and optimized by ANSYS High Frequency Structure Simulator
(HFSS 15 ) software and the parameter values defined in Fig.1
are listed as follows (unit: mm): L=W=69, H=22, L1=35, L2=16,
L3=11, W1=3.5, W2=2.7, W3=6, Lf1=13.2, Lf2=1.5, Lf3=10,
Lf4=19.8, Wf1=0.7, Wf2=1.5, Wf3=1.9, Le1=1, Le2=7.6, We=0.7,
Wr=1.7, Lr=2.2, Xc=5.6.
Fig. 2 compares the measured and simulated S-parameters of
the SI slot antenna. It is observed the measured results agree
well with the simulated ones. For a return loss better than 10 dB,
the slot antenna achieves an overlapped band of 620 MHz
ranging from 1680 to 2300 MHz with the isolation higher than
30 dB in most frequency band. The radiation patterns of the
antenna element for two ports are measured at 2 GHz and the
results are shown in Fig. 3. As expected, the antenna achieves
good cross-polarization roughly lower than -30 dB in both
XZ-plane and YZ-plane for both polarizations. The measured
efficiency of the antenna as well as the simulated one is
depicted in Fig. 4. It is evident that the antenna achieves an
average efficiency of 87.7%.
B. Impedance Matching
To characterize the proposed dual-polarized antenna, a
parametric study is conducted. The resonance condition
depends upon the total length (L1+L2 +L3) of the three-section
SI slotline, which is roughly equal to half of the wavelength. In
the design process, the lengths (L1, L2 and L3) of each section
are roughly determined according to the desired frequency
band, the widths (W1, W2 and W3) are utilized to achieve good
impedance matching. It is noteworthy that the middle section of
a pair of slots is directly excited by the stepped microstrip
feedline and its width (W1) is a sensitive parameter for
enhancing the operating property of the antenna. As shown in
Fig. 5, when reducing the width W1 of the SI slot, the spurious
frequency moves towards the first resonant frequency

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Fig. 7 Geometry of the dual-polarized antenna array. The key parameters are
Fig. 5 Simulated S-parameters of the proposed antenna with different W1. listed as follows: LG=562.5mm, WG=200mm, Hw=23mm, S=115mm.

Fig. 8 Prototype of the dual-polarized antenna array.

(a) (b)
Fig. 6 Simulated of the proposed antenna with different (a) Wf1 and (b) L.

isolation. Here, W1=3.5 mm is finally selected for a wideband

dual-polarized antenna with high isolation. On the other hand,
the microstrip feedline is also made into three steps for a good
transformation from 50 to the impedance of the SI slot
antenna. Fig. 6 (a) exhibits the effect of the width W f1 of the
stepped microstrip feedline on the characteristics. It is
observed that the impedance matching of the first resonance
becomes better due to larger impedance obtained on the slot
end when the width Wf1 decreases, which will improve the
performance of the antenna at lower frequency. Finally,
attention should be paid to the trade-off between the square
patch size and slot length. Longer slot length requires larger
Fig. 9 Simulated S-parameters of the power divider attached with its geometry.
patch size. However, when the length of the slot is fixed, The parameters are listed as follows (units: mm): Wd1=1.9, Wd2=1, Ld1=52.05,
decreasing the patch size dramatically improves the impedance Ld2=18.05, Ld3=95.05, Ld4=8.5, Ld5=37.5, Ld6= 9.65.
matching, as shown in Fig. 6 (b).

III. DUAL-POLARIZED ANTENNA ARRAY

Narrower beam and higher gain are generally required for
base-station antenna. Based on the proposed antenna in Section
II, a four-element dual-polarized antenna array fed by two
1-to-4 power dividers for each polarization is designed,
constructed and measured. The geometry of the antenna array
and its prototype are shown in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8, respectively.
The power divider illustrated in Fig. 9 is simple in structure and
just adopts λeff/4 (λeff roughly equals to the effective wavelength
at center frequency) impedance transformers and T-junctions,
with which the energy is separated into four identical parts.
Eight identical 50 coaxial lines achieve connection between
antenna elements and dividers. The element spacing (S) is
optimized as 0.8 λ0 for wide band and high gain without
obvious grating lobes for both polarizations. A U-shaped
reflector is applied to obtain a higher gain.
The divider with key parameters Wd1=1.9 mm and Wd2=1
mm is fabricated on a 1-mm thick FR4 substrate (εγ=4.4,
tanδ=0.02). Its simulated S-parameters are plotted in Fig. 9. It is
clearly seen that the input return loss is greater than 15 dB while
the insertion losses keep the same level of about 7.5 dB over a
Fig. 10 Measured and simulated S-parameters of the proposed antenna array.
wide frequency band from 1.55 to 2.55 GHz, which implies that
the divider can serve as a feeding network for the four-element
dual-polarized antenna array.
The measured and simulated S-parameters are shown in Fig.
10. It is observed that the dual-polarized antenna array achieves
bandwidths of 46.9% (1.55-2.5 GHz) and 38.7% (1.69-2.5 GHz)
compared with the simulated bandwidths of 45.4% (1.6-2.54
GHz) and 39.2% (1.7-2.53 GHz) for Port 1 and Port 2,
respectively. The isolation between the two ports across the
entire operating band is greater than 35 dB while the simulated
one is higher than 32 dB. The difference is mainly due to the
error in fabrication.

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(a) 1.8 GHz
(b) 2.1 GHz
(c) 2.4 GHz
Fig. 11 Measured radiation patterns at (a)1.8 GHz, (b) 2.1GHz and (c) 2.4GHz
for both ports.
Fig. 12 Measured and simulated gains for the proposed antenna array.
The mutual coupling between elements is investigated for a
better understanding of the antenna array. It is found the
coupling between adjacent elements for both polarizations is
roughly lower than -20 dB. The bandwidth of the array in [13]
is only 275 MHz for 0°polarization which is reduced by the
strong coupling. Compared with the antenna array in [13], the
proposed antenna array is almost unaffected by the mutual
coupling and a much wider common bandwidth of 810 MHz for
both polarizations is obtained consequently.
Fig. 11 shows the measured radiation patterns at three
discrete frequencies of 1.8, 2.1 and 2.4 GHz for both ports . It is
evident that the main beams of the radiation patterns are always
at broadside direction without unwanted splitting or tilting. It
can be also seen that the measured cross polarization levels in
both XZ-plane and YZ-plane are about 27 dB lower than
co-polarizations across the whole frequency band. Furthermore,
the front-to-back ratios remain better than 25 dB in most parts
of the operating band and 20 dB in the low frequency band. Due
to the slightly large element spacing, the side lobes of the
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4
antenna array across the wide band are not so good but still
better than 15 dB.
The gains of the proposed antenna array for both
polarizations are also measured and the results are plotted in
Fig. 12. The average gain achieved by the dual-polarized
antenna array is about 13.9 dBi with a difference of less than
0.4 dBi between the horizontal and vertical polarizations.
IV. CONCLUSION
A wideband dual-polarized stepped slot antenna with a
relatively low profile is proposed in this letter. The proposed
antenna achieves an overlapped band of 620 MHz for both
polarizations. On the basis of the proposed antenna, a
four-element dual-polarized antenna array is designed for
base-station applications. The array prototype achieves a wide
band in the range of 1.69-2.5 GHz, which covers GSM, PCS,
UMTS and WLAN. Over the entire operating band, the
isolation between the two ports keeps higher than 35 dB.
Measured radiation patterns also show this antenna array has
good unidirectional radiation performance with cross
polarization levels lower than -27 dB and front-to-back ratios
higher than 20 dB. Furthermore, the antenna array obtains high
and stable gains for both polarizations.
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