Wide-band Body Wearable Antennas

There is currently an interest in military and civil domains for the development of antennas which can be worn on the body. For safe and comfortable operation of the antennas they must be designed to be unobtrusive. In the application considered in this work, the antennas are also required to cover a wide bandwidth, both in terms of input performance and stable radiation patterns. Satisfying all these requirements for operation at low frequencies (such as UHF/VHF) is a challenging problem and is the subject of this paper. The set of design aims are presented and a review and down-selection of three candidate antennas is discussed. The computer modelling, design and manufacture of these antennas is also discussed and results are presented for measured antenna performance for on-body operation.