| Abstract: | Manipulating mutual coupling between antenna array elements is always a critical essential in designing phased arrays. In this article, an X‐shaped strip is applied to decouple a five‐element E‐plane microstrip antenna array, whose adjacent elements' center‐to‐center spacing is only 0.45 λ0. Simulation and measurement results reveal that the proposed array employing the loaded structure exhibits excellent decoupling capability, as in comparison to the reference array, impedance of every port is well matched, mutual coupling between both adjacent elements and nonadjacent ones is efficiently reduced and radiation patterns of every individual patch are markedly corrected. Besides, when beam scanning is performed, the proposed array is equipped with higher gain and lower SLL. The X‐shaped strip predicts a promising application in phased array and a large‐scale array. |
