Broadband suspended plate antenna for WiFi/WiMAX applications

This paper presents a high-gain broadband suspended plate antenna for indoor wireless access point applications. This antenna consists of two layers operating at two adjacent bands. The bottom plate is fed by a tapered down strip excited by a probe through an SMA RF connector. The top plate is shorted to a ground plane by a strip electromagnetically coupled with the feed-strip. The design is carried out using a commercial EM software package, and validated experimentally. The measured result shows that the antenna achieves a broad operational bandwidth of 66%, suitable for access points in WiFi (2.4-2.485 GHz) and WiMAX (2.3-2.7 GHz and the 3.4-3.6 GHz) systems (IEEE 802.11b/g and IEEE 802.16-2004/e). The measured antenna gain varies from 7.7-9.5 dBi across the frequency bands of interest. A parametric study of this antenna is also conducted.