Circularly polarized high efficiency wideband reflectarray using rectangle‐shaped patch element

A single‐layer circularly polarized reflectarray using rectangle‐shaped elements in X‐band is presented in this article. The designed element is analyzed and optimized with parametrical studies to obtain good performance at the operating frequency. The phase shifts can be controlled by varying the dimensions in two orthogonal directions of the element for circular polarization. A reflectarray antenna with 27 × 27 elements has been designed, manufactured and measured. The measured results show that the proposed reflectarray antenna provides a 1‐dB gain bandwidth of 18% and a 3‐dB axial ratio of 13%. The measured peak gain at 10 GHz is 26.1 dBi, which corresponds to the high aperture efficiency of 40.3%.