Small Printed Ultrawideband Antenna With Reduced Ground Plane Effect

A small printed antenna is described with a reduced ground-plane effect for ultrawideband (UWB) applications. The radiator and ground plane of the antenna are etched onto a piece of printed circuit board (PCB) with an overall size of 25mmtimes25 mmtimes1.5 mm. A notch is cut from the radiator while a strip is asymmetrically attached to the radiator. The simulation and measurement show that the miniaturized antenna achieves a broad operating bandwidth of 2.9-11.6 GHz for a 10-dB return loss. In particular, the ground-plane effect on impedance performance is greatly reduced by cutting the notch from the radiator because the electric currents on the ground plane are significantly suppressed at the lower edge operating frequencies. The antenna features three-dimensional omni-directional radiation with high radiation efficiency of 79%-95% across the UWB bandwidth. In addition, a parametric study of the geometric and electric parameters of the proposed antenna will be able to provide antenna engineers with more design information