Abstract
An improved low-profile printed antipodal drop-shaped dipole antenna for wide-band wireless applications is presented. The proposed radiating structure is integrated with a planar metal reflector useful to enhance antenna gain up to 5.5 dBi and the front-to-back ratio up to 21 dB. The geometry of reflector, feeding line, and dipole arms is optimized in order to achieve a broad operating bandwidth useful to meet the requirements of modern wireless communication protocols. Furthermore, the particular shape of the metal reflector and the adoption of a thin low-permittivity dielectric substrate result in a low distortion of the radiated field and a limited back radiation which makes the antenna suitable for UWB applications as well. These features, together with the low profile and the limited occupation area, make the antenna well adapted to mobile terminals as well as radio base stations. A locally conformal FDTD numerical procedure has been adopted to design and analyse the radiating structure, while a SEM technique has been employed to highlight the field perturbation caused by the antenna reflector as well as to extract the characteristics underlying the transient behaviour of the antenna. The experimental measurements performed on an antenna prototype are found to be in good agreement with the numerical computations.
Highlights
Wide-band antennas, having low profile and reduced manufacturing costs, are finding widespread interest in the industrial and the scientific community [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
A low-profile printed drop-shaped dipole antenna integrated with a planar metal reflector has been presented
It has been observed that the quasi-traveling wave behaviour of the radiated field induced by the special shape of the radiating arms is enhanced by the presence of the metal reflector already at the lowest working frequency of the antenna
Summary
Wide-band antennas, having low profile and reduced manufacturing costs, are finding widespread interest in the industrial and the scientific community [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. The growing demand for portable and/or wearable devices is further expanding the application ranges of such antennas [15,16,17,18] In this context, antennas designed to support UWB signals, that is, such as to ensure a low distortion of the radiated signals, can be used in both wide-band wireless applications and pulsed radio communications. Even though said antenna exhibits excellent electromagnetic performance, in some applications it may be useful to employ an antenna having a higher gain along the broadside direction, as well as a more limited emission in the direction of the feeding line To this end, in this paper a low-profile drop-shaped antenna provided with a planar metal reflector is presented. Thanks to the full parameterization of the geometrical profile of the antenna, an automatic design procedure can be usefully adopted in order to ensure a proper 50 Ω impedance matching over a wide frequency range
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