Effect of textile materials on wearable antenna performance: a case study of GPS antennas

Recently, textile antennas have been presented in international conferences. These studies have demonstrated that fabrics are suitable for microstrip antenna substrates. In this paper, our study focuses on the characterization of different synthetic fabrics suitable for circular polarized micro-strip antennas. Special attention is paid to GPS antennas. Five different synthetic textile materials are chosen for the comparison. The word textile is typically used for antenna class and fabric to describe a particular material. However, in many cases these words are interchangeable.