High-gain aperture-coupled microstrip array antenna

A high gain aperture-coupled microstrip array antenna is presented in this paper. Its basic structure is a microstrip comprising of three layers. On the top layer, 2×4 patches are etched and act as radiation elements. The middle layer is a metal ground with rectangular slots, and the bottom layer consists of a microstrip feedline. After optimization by a FDTD algorithm, a prototype antenna is fabricated and measured. The measured results agree well with the simulated data, and show a high gain of 15.7 dBi at 5.8 GHz and an bandwidth of 300MHz for S
₁₁
<;-10 dB is obtained.