Feeding Methods

A feedline is used to excite to radiate by direct or indirect contact. There are many different methods of feeding and four most popular methods are microstrip line feed, coaxial probe, aperture coupling and proximity coupling.

 

Microstrip Line Feeding

Microstrip line feed is one of the easier methods to fabricate as it is a just conducting strip connecting to the patch and therefore can be consider as extension of patch. It is simple to model and easy to match by controlling the inset position. However the disadvantage of this method is that as substrate thickness increases, surface wave and spurious feed radiation increases which limit the bandwidth.

Coaxial Feeding

 Coaxial feeding is feeding method in which that the inner conductor of the coaxial is attached to the radiation patch of the antenna while the outer conductor is connected to the ground plane.

Advantages

•         Easy of fabrication
  
•         Easy to match
  
•         Low spurious radiation
  

Disadvantages

• Narrow bandwidth
• Difficult to model specially for thick substrate
• Possess inherent asymmetries which generate higher order modes which produce cross-polarization radiation.

Aperture Coupling

 Aperture coupling consist of two different substrate separated by a ground plane. On the bottom side of lower substrate there is a microstrip feed line whose energy is coupled to the patch through a slot on the ground plane separating two substrates. This arrangement allows independent optimization of the feed mechanism and the radiating element. Normally top substrate uses a thick low dielectric constant substrate while for the bottom substrate; it is the high dielectric substrate. The ground plane, which is in the middle, isolates the feed from radiation element and minimizes interference of spurious radiation for pattern formation and polarization purity.

 Advantages

• Allows independent optimization of feed mechanism element.

Proximity Coupling

Proximity coupling has the largest bandwidth, has low spurious radiation. However fabrication is difficult. Length of feeding stub and width-to-length ratio of patch is used to control the match.