Summary
International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation
2008
Session Number:1C01
Session:
Number:1C01-4
A Modified Two-Strip Monopole Antenna for WMAN Applications
K. L. Chung, T. H. Mak, W. Y. Tam,
pp.-
Publication Date:2008/10/27
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
The Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and the recent wireless broadband (WiBro) have emerged as the promising technologies for broadband access in wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) environment. WiBro, in fact, is the South Korean service name for IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX. It is now becoming a subset of the broader WiMAX standard. One of the potential applications of WiMAX is to provide backhaul support for mobile WiFi hotspots. In order to satisfy the integration of WiFi, WiBro and WiMAX for WMAN applications, multiband yet compact antennas are the preferred front-end for such mobile handsets/terminals. Recently a novel type of dual-band two-strip planar antennas has been reported [1]-[2]. The two-strip antennas consist of an S-strip and a T-strip, and have no shorting via in the antenna structures. These antennas made use of the concepts of double-T antenna [3], inverted FL antenna [4], electromagnetic coupling and two-strip configuration [5]-[6]. Owing to the strong EM coupling between strips, these two-strip antennas have the advantages of not just light-weight and compact but also have the monopole-like radiation patterns with wide dual-band operations. However, these antennas [1]-[2] are mainly designed for the WiFi or Wireless LAN applications, namely 2.4 & 5 GHz bands. Further, these antennas have adopted a very thin substrate ? 10 mil RT/Duroid 5880, which is a soft texture, may not be suitable to be used as a printed circuit board for microwave devices. In this paper, we aim to report a successful modification of the two-strip monopole antenna. This antenna has been designed and fabricated at the department of Electronic and Information Engineering, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The modification has addressed the weakness of the original designs by employing a thicker (31 mil) Duriod substrate. The modified monopole antenna is now a penta-band rather than a dual-band antenna, in addition to the WiFi/Wilress LAN frequency bands (802.11a/b/g/n: 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz), and the 5.8 GHz UNII band, it covers also the mobile WiMAX and WiBro bands (802.16e: 3.5?3.7 GHz). The antenna geometry is presented in Section 2 whereas simulation and measurement results are compared in Section 3. Conclusion is included in Section 4.