A Comparative Study Between Dielectric and Microstrip Antenna Arrays for GPS Application

This paper presents the performance comparison between a top-loaded circular dielectric resonator antenna (TLCDRA) and a microstrip antenna (MSA), both designed to operate at GPS L1-Band (centered at 1.575 GHz). The TLCDRA is excited by cross-rectangular slots to achieve circular polarization, while the MSA uses a coaxial probe along the patch diagonal. Then, the antennas are arranged in a \(2\times2\) planar array with two inter-element spacings: \(0.5\lambda_0\) and \(0.4\lambda_0\). In order to assess the performance of the proposed arrays, a study on the beam steering scenarios are simulated, and the resulting radiation patterns, including gain and axial ratio characteristics, are analyzed and discussed.