A Side-Loaded-Metal Decoupling Method for 2N Patch Antenna Arrays

To suppress the strong mutual coupling among 2 × N patch antenna arrays, a very simple decoupling method is presented in this letter, where only a metal block is utilized and loaded in the center of the 2 × N arrays. With the proposed method, the coupling between horizontal, vertical as well as diagonal pairs of adjacent antenna elements are well suppressed to a low level. To verify the practical performance, a 2 × 8 antenna array centered at 3.5 GHz and integrated with the proposed decoupling method is further developed and fabricated. The measured results denote that the maximum mutual coupling among the array is suppressed from −15.4 to −26.9 dB, with a fairly low insertion loss level. The design and implementation of the proposed decoupling method are very simple with a low profile and can be widely used for large-scale array applications with the 2 × N configuration.