Bandwidth Enhanced Low-VHF Communications with a Miniature Non-Foster Antenna

We investigate low-frequency communications with a highly miniature bandwidth-enhanced antenna. To achieve improved bandwidth while maintaining a small form factor, a non-Foster matching technique is applied to a λ/50 low-VHF antenna. The practical use of existing non-Foster matched antennas has been hindered due to their sensitivity to small system induced variations as well as nearby scatterers. We carry out software defined radio based wireless data transmission experiments with varying data rates to investigate the performance of our proposed antenna for practical applications in indoor environments. Experimental results show the non-Foster matched antenna enables transmitting data with rates three times higher than the same antenna matched with passive elements. We present communication quality measures by transmitting several packets and computing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR), the symbol error rate, and cross-correlation between transmitted and received pulses.