Experimental characterization of a reconfigurable multiband Minkowski patch antenna

In this work a reconfigurable Minkowski patch antenna has been designed, fabricated, and measured. The proposed patch antenna has the advantage of low profile, lightweight, and easy fabrication, and is potential for wireless communication applications. Ansoft Designer^™ software aided the regonfigurable multiband antenna design with applications for wireless networks. In particular, a prototype was built with applications for Wi-Fi considering for the IEEE 802.11a standard and WiMAX. Frequency reconfigurability is achieved by means of switches placed on the pre-fractal edges of the proposed antenna. The conducted experimental characterization of the Minkowski patch antenna was done with a vector network analyzer in the range of 100 KHz to 7.0 GHz and showed very promising results.