UHF Reader Antenna System for Near and Far-Field RFID Operation

In order to detect the RFID tags kept inside an enclosure, the reader antenna can couple energy into another antenna kept in the near-field region. To detect the tags placed in the far-field, the reader antenna should have a good gain. Usually, these two requirements compete with each other due to the effect of coupling on the frequency of operation of the antenna system. In this paper, modification to a loop antenna is proposed such that it can operate in both near and far-field. Loop antenna with high impedance surface reflector results in a low-profile antenna pair where both the antennas can interchangeably operate in near-field and far-field, with their operating frequency band independent of the spacing between the antennas. The performance of the proposed antennas is compared with that of several other antennas by measuring the read range of RFID tags. It is found that the proposed antennas perform better in comparison with the other antennas when detecting the tags placed inside an enclosure. When operating as a far-field antenna, their performance is very close to that of a conventional RFID reader antenna which is optimized only for far-field operation.