Dual-Band Long-Range Passive RFID Tag Antenna Using an AMC Ground Plane

A dual-band passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tag antenna applicable for a recessed cavity in metallic objects such as heavy equipment, vehicles, aircraft, and containers with long read range is proposed by using an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) ground plane. The proposed tag antenna consists of a bowtie antenna and a recessed cavity with the AMC ground plane installed on the bottom side of the cavity. The AMC ground plane is utilized to provide dual-band operation at European (869.5 869.7 MHz) and Korean (910 914 MHz) passive UHF RFID bands by replacing the bottom side of the metallic cavity of a PEC-like behavior and, therefore, changing the reflection phase of the ground plane. It is worthwhile to mention that the European and the Korean UHF RFID bands are allocated very closely, and the frequency separation ratio between the two bands is just about 0.045, which is very small. It is demonstrated by experiment that the maximum reading distance of the proposed tag antenna with optimized dimensions can be improved more than 3.1 times at the two RFID bands compared to a commercial RFID tag.