The cylindrical omnidirectional patch antenna

In recent years, the need for omnidirectional (in the azimuth plane) antennas with narrow beams in the elevation plane, for wireless applications increased considerably. The antennas are used in many frequency bands anywhere from 0.8 to 6 GHz, in a variety of configurations. The different collinear-array configurations are designed using back-to-back wide-beam elements or by simply using radiating elements with an intrinsic omnidirectional pattern. The motivation for this work was to devise a radiation element which has an omnidirectional pattern in the azimuth plane and allows for the design and fabrication of arrays that can be easily integrated with other collinear arrays to generate a multitasking omnidirectional antenna. The element proposed in this paper is a patch, which was built in a cylindrical geometry rather than a planar one, and which generates an omnidirectional pattern in the azimuthal plane.