A Novel Linearly Polarized Metal-only Beam Reconfigurable Magneto-electric Dipole Antenna

A novel beam reconfigurable magneto-electric dipole antenna is presented. The electric dipole is designed with two H-shaped patches and the E-shaped strip is designed as feeding structure to achieve wide impedance bandwidth. The upper ground etched with two symmetric slots is used to connect the magnetic dipole to reduce the profile. And the lower ground act as reflector to suppress the back radiation. Four binary switches are loaded on the stubs of the electric dipole. By controlling the state of each switch to ON or OFF, the antenna has the ability of beam reconfiguration. Finally, a set of prototype antenna with three configurations is simulated to verify the feasibility of design method. The -10 dB impedance bandwidth is 63 %. At 2.7 GHz, the beam directions of three states point to -22°, 16° and 33°, respectively in E-plane. The maximum gain at three states is 9.4 dBi.