Design of Hexagonal Meander Fractal Antenna for Multiband Applications

A novel design of the fractal antenna is designed using hexagonal and meander geometry and its various characteristics are investigated in this paper. Proposed antenna is designed on low-cost easily available FR4 glass epoxy substrate with relative permittivity of 4.4 and a thickness of 1.6mm. The antenna is designed and simulated by using High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) version 13. The basic structure of designed antenna is optimized by applying inset feeding technique to achieve the high value of gain and return loss. Simulated results of proposed antenna reveal that the antenna works on six frequency bands of operation such as 3.14GHz, 4.87GHz, 5.74GHz, 6.55GHz, 8.62GHz and 9.85GHz with a value of return loss, gain and VSWR at acceptable level. Both the antennas are also fabricated and then tested using VNA (Vector Network Analyzer), which shows that the experimental results are in good agreement with the simulated results. Proposed antenna resonates at six different frequency bands including WLAN (4.82-5.95GHz), point to point high-speed wireless communication (5.92-8.5GHz) etc. The maximum gain of the proposed fractal antenna can reach 8.80dB at lower frequency band and 7.59dB at upper-frequency band.