A Differential-Fed Magneto-Electric Dipole Antenna for UWB Applications

A new magneto-electric dipole antenna with a unidirectional radiation pattern is proposed. A novel differential feeding structure is designed to provide an ultra-wideband impedance matching. A stable gain of 8.25±1.05 dBi is realized by introducing two slots in the magneto-electric dipole and using a rectangular box-shaped reflector, instead of a planar reflector. The antenna can achieve an impedance bandwidth of 114% for SWR ≤ 2 from 2.95 to 10.73 GHz. Radiation patterns with low cross polarization, low back radiation, fixing broadside direction mainbeam and symmetrical E- and H -plane patterns are obtained over the operating frequency range. Moreover, the correlation factor between the transmitting antenna input signal and the receiving antenna output signal is calculated for evaluating the time-domain characteristic. The proposed antenna, which is small in size, can be constructed easily by using PCB fabrication technique.