Abstract
A novel approach is proposed to design a circularly polarized (CP) hemispherical dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with a wide axial ratio (AR) bandwidth by incorporating an additional dielectric substrate between the antenna and the ground plane. This is in addition to the lower feeding substrate that is located between the ground plane on one side and the feeding microstrip line on the other side. Adding another substrate on top of the ground plane provided an additional degree of freedom in the design that facilitated the achievement of ab 18% AR bandwidth. In addition, an integrated hemispherical DRA and perforated substrate configuration was utilized to achieve optimum effective substrate permittivity and overcome the DRA alignment and assembly challenges while maintaining the achieved wide CP bandwidth. A close agreement was achieved between measurements and simulations.