In this letter, a novel design of a switchable microstrip antenna is proposed for circular polarization diversity. The proposed antenna has a simple construction of inner and outer corner-truncated radiating circular patches for switchable circular polarization. By controlling the state of two PIN diodes, left- and right-hand circular polarizations are easily alternated. The results of experiments show excellent switching radiation performances at the resonant frequency and good agreements with the simulated ones.

There have been many theoretical and experimental investigations on polarization diversity reception characteristics at base stations. The diversity gain was evaluated based on the distribution of the instantaneous received power in these investigations. The mainstream mobile communication systems are shifting to standardized IMT-2000 systems and the W-CDMA system is one of them. The effect using base station polarization diversity in W-CDMA must be evaluated by considering not only antenna diversity, but also RAKE reception/path diversity. Furthermore, Transmit Power Control (TPC) is applied to overcome the near-far problem of mobile units that maintain a fixed reception power level in W-CDMA systems. Therefore, traditional diversity gain cannot be used as an evaluation metric. This paper proposes a theoretical analysis method for diversity gain using base station polarization diversity in W-CDMA. The evaluation model used for theoretical analysis is verified based on a comparison with the experimental results and the analytical results of the practical diversity gain are clarified.

This paper introduces a novel MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) communication system having orthogonal dual polarization diversity branches. We have designed a dual polarized circular patch antenna which has two orthogonal polarization ports such as vertical polarization (V) and horizontal polarization (H) on its metal surface. This design makes it works as two independent antennas in multipath environments. By using two dual polarized antennas at both the transmitter and receiver, we designed a dual-polarization 44 MIMO experiment system. This system can be used to investigate the performance of various MIMO transmission methods as well as the performance of adaptive algorithms in indoor multipath environments. To investigate the performance of our experiment system, we carried out a number of MIMO transmission experiments such as space-time-coded transmission having two parallel streams and MIMO eigenmode transmission. We will show the results of those experiments and discuss the advantages of using polarization diversity in MIMO communication system for next generation broadband wireless communication.

A polarization diversity planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) on portable telephone in the practical use near the operator's body is investigated at 1,800 MHz under multipath urban environment. The antenna structure comprises a center-fed square patch with one permanent short-pin and two RF-switches on three corners. The RF-switches perform as the polarization branch switches for dominantly vertical polarization (VP) or dominantly horizontal polarization (HP) modes. The radiation efficiency of the polarization diversity PIFA is 58% and 53% for VP and HP modes, respectively, which is higher than the 52% efficiency of the reference λ/4 monopole antenna under the same condition. The mean effective gain (MEG) of VP and HP modes decrease with respect to the increasing cross-polarization power ratio (XPR). The correlation coefficient of two diversity branches is between 0.66 through all the possible XPR ranging from -10 dB to +10 dB. The diversity gain is computed from the MEG and correlation coefficient to determine the diversity antenna gain (DAG). The diversity gain, based on 10-3 BER for selective combining, is 7.5 dB over non-diversity reception. The DAG is -1.2+2.8 dBi which is approximately 4 dB lower than the case without human body. In other words, the presence of the human body degrades the communication performance by a half.

An intermediate-frequency-combining (IF-combining) polarization diversity using frequency conversion is proposed. The proposed diversity requires no phase controller as opposed to the conventional IF-combining diversity. It has been theoretically clarified that this diversity has polarization insensitive bit-error-rate (BER) characteristics. The effectiveness has been confirmed by experiments in which the sensitivity dependence on the polarization is suppressed to within 0.8dB and a stable 101km fiber transmission at 600Mbit/s is achieved.