In this paper, a low profile dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is proposed and investigated. To achieve the broad impedance bandwidth the proposed antenna geometry combines the dielectric resonator antenna and an underlying microstrip-fed slot with a narrow rectangular notch, which effectively broadens the impedance bandwidth by merging the resonances of slot and DRA. The physical insight gained by the detailed parametric study has led to find out a set of guidelines for designing the antennas for any particular frequency band. The design guidelines have been verified by simulating a set of antennas designed for different frequency bands. For validation, a prototype antenna is fabricated and tested experimentally. The measured results show that the proposed DRA offers an impedance bandwidth of about \(125.34\%\) from 1.17 to 5.1 GHz with reasonable gain between 3.5 and 5.7 dBi. The volume of the proposed DRA is \(0.16\lambda _{dr}^{3}\), where \(\lambda _{dr}\) is the wavelength at center operating frequency of the DR. A comprehensive study on bandwidth shows that the proposed DRA provides maximum bandwidth in terms of the DR volume (\(\hbox {BW}/V_{dr}\)) and the DR height (\(\hbox {BW}/h_{dr}\)) than the other similar reported work on hybrid wideband DRA designs.