Exploiting RF MEMS Switches for Pattern Reconfigurable Parasitic Antennas

New generation Radio Frequency Microelectromechanical Systems (RF MEMS) Switches with high performance have been developed recently and the capability to exploit them for designing reconfigurable antennas is presented in this paper. A parasitic antenna on a planar structure with the Yagi-Uda concept is used as a proof of concept. The structure is composed of a dipole of half the wavelength of the operational frequency (the driven element) and a set of parallel parasitic elements on the sides that are exploited to tune the antenna characteristics. Four antenna configurations are obtained by adjusting the length of the parasitic elements using RF MEMS switches placed at suitable discontinuities. The preliminary results demonstrated that the considered antenna structure (operating in the X-band) is able to steer the beam from broadside to end fire pattern keeping a return loss below −10 dB and a good gain in all the antenna configurations.