On the use of wide-band, high-gain, microstrip antennas for mobile telephones

The increasing use of cellular telephones has spawned considerable research effort on the design of compact, high-efficiency antennas for mobile telephones, exhibiting low EM coupling to the human head. Microstrip antennas seem now to render possible the achievement of all these characteristics. We present some results on a stacked microstrip antenna designed at the University of Utah, comparing its performance with that of a typical handset equipped with the conventional monopole antenna. The main thrust is to highlight the problems associated with typical mobile-telephone antennas, and to show how microstrip-antenna technology could solve most of these problems.