Low-profile independently- and concurrently-tunable quad-band antenna for single chain sub-6GHz 5G new radio applications

This paper presents a quad-band frequency agile antenna, with independent and concurrent frequency tunability in each band, for a tunable, concurrent, quad-band single chain radio receiver for 5G New Radio (NR). More specifically, the antenna comprises of four planar slots etched in a ground plane and fed through a single microstrip feedline, without any impedance matching network. The structure is optimized to maximize isolation between the individual slots and their respective resonant frequencies. Furthermore, a novel high order harmonic suppression method is demonstrated, which controls the current distribution via creating a fictitious short circuit in the slot antenna-enabling the antenna to achieve a much wider tuning range. Numerical simulations are verified using experimental implementation and measurements, with good agreement observed. The four slots resonate around the 830 MHz, 1.8 GHz, 2.4 GHz and 3.4 GHz frequency bands, which are independently tuned (using a varactor diode in each slot) to achieve tuning ranges of approximately 64%, 66%, 27% and 33%, respectively. More importantly, the contiguous four bands covers a total frequency tuning from 0.6 to 3.6 GHz i.e. a tuning range of approximately 143%. Finally, far-field measurements are performed and the antenna is evaluated in over-the-air testbed (quad-band radio receiver), which measures the Error Vector Magnitude performance for the individual channels. Good performance is observed, confirming acceptable isolation performance between the four bands. The data reported in this paper is available, from ORDA-The University of Sheffield Research Data Catalogue and Repository, at https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.11219000.v1.