Bandwidth enhancement of dipole antennas using parasitic elements

Dipole antennas have a limited bandwidth which restricts their use to narrow bandwidth applications. To improve the functionality of a dipole antenna, additional wire elements can be added to the dipole antenna to increase the impedance matching and bandwidth. Three different wire dipole antennas are designed and compared using the computational electromagnetic software FEKO to determine how the additional wire elements affect the impedance matching, reflection coefficient, bandwidth, and gain. The results show a 37.5% improvement in the bandwidth without sacrificing the gain and radiation pattern of the antenna.