Printed Dipole Integrated with Minimal Balun

A cunning idea for realizing antenna baluns with very simple architecture and straightforward design procedure is investigated. The key innovation is the ingenious way to connect the unbalanced terminal to the balanced output. The unique connection makes the remaining part of the balun function no more than a routine matching network, in which all kind of matching techniques can be applied to transform an arbitrary load impedance to a given source one. The concept is verified by integrating the balun to a common printed dipole antenna having three arbitrary complex loads. The matching network is simply an L-section to achieve minimal complexity. Experimental results support the unique idea and show high degrees of design flexibility.