Combined Shark-Fin Rooftop Antenna for LTE, WLAN and BeiDou Applications

Abstract

This paper presents rooftop automobile antennas designed for Long-Term Evolution (LTE), Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and navigation system applications. The proposed antennas are housed within a shark-fin structure on the car’s roof, and comprise a main antenna and a diversity antenna. The main antenna and diversity antenna combine for spatial diversity, receiving and processing the same signal to optimize signal quality. To accommodate the limited space within the shark-fin housing, various miniaturization and multiband techniques are utilized. The hexagonal substrate is more closely fitted to the shape of the shark fin, thus making full use of the space of the shark-fin shell. The main antenna and the diversity antenna are perpendicular to each other, which saves the space of the overall antenna and improves the utilization rate of the overall antenna space. The proposed main antenna, compactly sized at 50 mm × 20 mm × 1.59 mm, maintains a VSWR value below 2 across the frequency range of 1.19–2.8 GHz, enabling support for LTE bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 15, 16, 34, 39, 40, and 41, as well as WLAN 2400 bands. The diversity antenna maintains a VSWR value below 2 across the frequency range of 1.5–2.6 GHz, which can cover BeiDou B1-1, LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 15, 16, 34, 39, and 40, and WLAN 2400 bands. The main antenna and the diversity antenna both demonstrate favorable radiation patterns on the azimuth plane. Simulation and measurement results exhibit a high level of agreement.