paper 150205053500

Abstract

For excellent tag-read communication in RFID applications, an interrogator equipped with an antenna having a circularly polarised radiation pattern is required. The antenna must also maintain a low profile and be compact for ease of installation. A more compact QHA is developed by linearly-shifting its helical elements for minimal optimum quadrature-distance. As a result, a novel QHA design, a “linearly-shifted quadrifilar helical antenna” (LSQHA) is pro- posed to operate at 900 MHz RFID applications using Genetic Algorithm (GA) driver with the industry-standard NEC-2 computational analysis program. Performance of the GA-optimised antenna shows that it has a 3 dB beamwidth of 90 degrees and a total gain of 13.1 dBi at the design frequency of 900 MHz. The proposed antenna excellently meets VSWR and return loss requirements within the frequency boundary of (875–912.5) MHz. The performance also shows that the proposed LSQHA is circularly polarised.

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Raed A. Abd-Alhameed

M. O. Akinsolu

Ammar Ali

A. Atojoko

Issa T. E. Elfergani

Abubakar Sadiq Hussaini

E. Ibrahim

James M. Noras

Jonathan Rodriguez