The wall admittance of an arbitrarily shaped microstrip antenna is generally formulated. As examples, elliptical microstrip antennas with and without a circular slot are calculated. The wall admittance is determined by the spectral domain analysis in order to consider the effect of the dielectric substrate. The electromagnetic fields within the cavity are expanded in terms of the eigenfunctions in the cylindrical coordinate system and their expansion coefficients are determined by applying the impedance boundary condition at the aperture in the sense of the least squares. The calculated input impedance and axial ratio agree fairly well with the experimental data. The proposed method is valid for the microstrip antennas with a patch whose geometry deviates from the particular coordinate system, such as single-feed circularly polarized microstrip antennas.

The formulation of the wall admittance of a circular microstrip antenna by the spectral domain method is presented. The circular microstrip antenna is calculated using the cavity model. The electromagnetic fields within the antenna cavity are determined from the impedance boundary condition at the side aperture. The contribution from the region outside the antenna is taken into account by the wall admittance. The wall admittance is defined by the magnetic field produced by the equivalent magnetic current at the aperture. The magnetic field is calculated by the spectral domain method. The wall admittances obtained by this method are compared with the results calculated by Shen. The calculated input impedances of the microstrip antenna agree fairly well with the experimental data for the substrate thickness of up to 0.048λg. The formulation of wall admittance presented here is easily applicable to arbitrarily shaped microstrip antennas.

Conical beam pattern is well suited for low mobile or maritime mobile antennas used in cheap and low G/T satellite communication system. Various solutions have been already proposed to generate circular polarized conical patterns; some authors use single microstrip patch working on higher order modes [1], [2], while others have built arrays of patches [3]-[5]. The present letter describes the design of an array of slot fed patches with its feed network and the experimental results which have been obtained in S-band.