Improving gain performance by using air substrate at 5.8GHz

The popularity of microstrip antennas is increasing day by day because of ease of analysis and fabrication. This paper concerned on enhancement of gain for microstrip patch planar array antenna by using air substrate. The structure in this project is 2 by 2 microstrip patch planar array antenna with substrate ε
_r
= 1at frequency 5.8 GHz. Frequency for 5.8GHz can be applied to unlicensed WiMAX. In this project, the simulation is performed by using the simulation software Computer Simulation Technology (CST) Microwave Studio which is a commercially available electromagnetic simulator based on finite difference time domain technique. In this design the application of air to replace regular Flame Retardant 4 (FR-4) materials as the substrate. The substrate used for the design is air which is the thickness equal to 3mm . The thickness for the patch in this design is 0.12mm while the thickness for the ground is equal to 0.035mm. The performance of the designed antenna was analyzed in term of bandwidth, gain, return loss, VSWR, and radiation pattern.