Transmission of a broadband FSK signal from a dynamically tuned narrowband antenna

Abstract

A frequency reconfigurable patch antenna is dynamically tuned to transmit frequency-shift keying (FSK) signals over a range of frequencies much broader than the static impedance bandwidth of the antenna. Experiments are conducted for two binary FSK schemes having different carrier spacing. In both cases, dynamic tuning of the antenna is shown to increase the amplitude of the radiated signal by providing a better match than the static antenna. However, the average energy of the radiated bit at each carrier frequency decreases as the symbol rate increases beyond the 3 dB bandwidth of the antenna. Therefore, the bandwidth of the antenna is found to be a limiting factor for the maximum achievable data rate in this scheme. As an alternative to shorter bit durations, the authors show that a higher level FSK scheme using dynamic tuning is able to increase throughput beyond what is possible with a static antenna.