Wideband Stacked Rectangular Dielectric Resonator Antenna at 5.2 GHz

Abstract

This paper presents a design of stacked rectangular dielectric resonator antenna (RDRA) with wide bandwidth, in the range of 13.56 % is described. The antenna exploits two low-Q modes with overlapping bandwidths to achieve a wide continuous bandwidth. This is achieved using low-permittivity DRA volume placed on high permittivity DRA volume. The antenna consists of dielectric constant of 10 and 32, stacked vertically to obtain improved bandwidth as compared to the conventional RDRA. A 50 Ω microstrip line is used in the proposed antenna as a feeding mechanism. Physical parameters of stacked RDRA have been optimized by extensive simulations using Ansoft HFSS. The parameters of antenna are 17x7x4.56 <i>mm</i><SUP>3</SUP> with grounded substrate size: 80x50 <i>mm</i><SUP>2</SUP>. The prototype is fabricated. Measured and simulated results are both in good agreement. The prototype antenna designed to operate in band from 5.0 to 5.7 GHz with measured gain at 5.2 GHz resonant frequency. The proposed antenna is suitable for wireless local area networks (WLAN) applications in 5 GHz frequency band (in the frequency range 5.15-5.35 GHz and 5.5-5.7 GHz). This stacked RDRA exceeds the bandwidth requirements for IEEE 802.11a WLAN applications within a required VSWR. Parametric studies of the stacked DRA are presented.