1314 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

8, 2009

Planar High-Gain WLAN PCB Antenna

Dmitry E. Zelenchuk, Member, IEEE, and Vincent F. Fusco, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—A simple design for a low-profile high-gain planar an-

tenna has been presented in the letter. The antenna has the realized
gain between 9 and 11 dBi and the return loss better than 10 dB
over the 5.6–6.3-GHz frequency band, i.e. 11% bandwidth. A nu-
merical study highlighting effects of key geometrical parameters
on the gain and return loss of the antenna has been performed. It
has been shown as well that the presented antenna occupies area
20% smaller than a conventional microstrip patch antenna array
with a similar gain.
Index Terms—Antenna gain, directive antennas, microstrip an-
tennas.

I. INTRODUCTION

L OW-COST and compact antennas are a key element of

modern wireless communications. High gain and wide
bandwidth of an antenna are required for many applications in
order to ensure necessary quality of service. One important de- Fig. 1. Antenna topology.
veloping application is the 5.8-GHz wireless local area network
(WLAN), [1]. In order to meet operational requirements, planar
antenna arrays for this application have previously been pro- In the design presented here, two additional patches are in-
posed. Usually to achieve 9 dBi or greater gain, an array of sev- serted inside the loops of a grid array as shown in Fig. 1. This
eral patch elements is required, but the bandwidth is typically permits 50- matching of the antenna over a wider bandwidth
about 2%–5% [2]. that would otherwise be possible, keeping the height of the sub-
An alternative strategy for obtaining moderate gain with strate low and simultaneously maintaining the directivity of the
a good bandwidth in a planar configuration is the grid array overall structure high.
antenna [3]–[5]. In the letter, this topology has been loaded The antenna was designed for realization on 1.52-mm-thick
with parasitic patches in order to control directivity and input Taconic TLY-5 substrate with permittivity of 2.2, loss tangent
impedance match. The resulting embodiment, a novel form of of 0.0009, and 1 oz copper metallization. The parameters of
the classical three-element grid array, yields better return loss the antenna are obtained by repeated analysis with HFSS [8] as
and gain than its equivalent classical counterpart. mm, mm, mm, mm,
mm, mm, and mm.
II. DESIGN In order to clarify the effect of the inserted patches, a para-
Traditional grid array antennas are comprised of two major metric study for different values of and was performed.
building blocks—namely, microstrip lines of wavelength and The results are shown in Figs. 2 and 3. One observes that the
half-wavelength [6]. The wavelength-long strips do not radiate patches introduce additional parasitic reactance, which alters
and simply interconnect radiating half-wavelength strips. Thus, the return loss of the antenna, and that at certain values for
radiation properties are mostly defined by the short strips, mm, mm, the resulting return loss
whereas matching greatly depends on both. In separate devel- appears doubly resonant, leading to the superior bandwidth ca-
opments, it has been shown that gap-coupled parasitic patches pability of the antenna. As shown in Fig. 2, the width of the
can improve the bandwidth of antennas [7]. patch does not change return loss noticeably. However, its
length is a critical design parameter having: 1) almost no ef-
fect for mm; 2) single narrowband resonance for
Manuscript received August 20, 2009; revised October 31, 2009. First mm; and 3) yielding 11% bandwidth for 10 dB re-
published December 04, 2009; current version published December 18, 2009. turn loss for mm.
This work was supported by Northern Ireland Department for Employment
and Learning under “Strengthening All Island—“Mobile Wireless Futures”
The realized gain of the antenna, i.e., gain incorporating mis-
research program. match loss [9], is not completely correlated with the return loss.
The authors are with the ECIT, Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast BT3 As seen in Fig. 3, does not influence gain significantly. This
9DT, U.K. (e-mail: d.zelenchuk@qub.ac.uk; v.fusco@qub.ac.uk). is not the case for . In the 6–6.3-GHz frequency band, the dif-
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. ference in return loss for mm and mm
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2009.2037718 lies within 1.1 dB, however the realized gain difference varies
1536-1225/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE
ZELENCHUK AND FUSCO: PLANAR HIGH-GAIN WLAN PCB ANTENNA
Fig. 2. Simulated reflection coefficient of the antenna with inserted patches and
without them.
Fig. 3. Simulated realized gain of the antenna with inserted patches and without
them.
from 2.5 to 10 dBi. Thus, according to the results of the para-
metric numerical study, patches with mm and
mm were chosen for the final design, and an antenna with
these parameters was built.
III. MEASUREMENT RESULTS
The measured characteristics together with the simulation re-
sults are discussed below. Fig. 4 shows very good agreement
between the measured return loss and the simulated one. The
antenna is fed by an SMA launcher.
The realized gain was measured with standard reference an-
tenna replacement technique. A 10-dBi horn was taken as a ref-
erence antenna, and the gain difference between the horn and
antenna under test (AUT) was measured. Then, the realized gain
of the AUT was trivially recovered.
The results of the measurements are presented in Fig. 5.
The measured gain is 1 dBi less than the simulated one at
1315
Fig. 4. Measured and simulated reflection coefficient of the antenna under test.
Fig. 5. Measured and simulated realized gain of the antenna under test.
5.7–5.9 GHz and exceeds it by 1 dBi at 6.1–6.3 GHz. The
difference is attributed to manufacturing and measurement
errors.
A conventional rectangular patch array usually consists of
half-wavelength-wide elements with their centers separated by
a wavelength. Such an array of three elements theoretically has
a gain of up to 11.3 dBi at the resonance (6.6 dBi is a patch
gain and dB) [10]. The width of such an array
is about 2.5 wavelengths, whereas the AUT is only two wave-
lengths wide and has comparable gain in a wide frequency band.
Thus, the AUT is about 20% smaller than the conventional mi-
crostrip patch array. Accounting for a feeding network could
increase the figure.
The radiation patterns at the several frequencies across the
band are demonstrated in Fig. 6. In the E-plane, the antenna ex-
hibits almost uniform dipole-like pattern, whereas it is direc-
tive in the H-plane. The measured cross-polarization level was
1316
Fig. 6. Radiation patterns of the antenna under test.
below 20 dB. As one can see, the level of sidelobes increases
at higher frequencies, yet it stays below 10 dB.
IV. CONCLUSION
A novel low-profile wideband directive printed circuit board
(PCB) antenna based on grid array antenna has been presented
in the letter. The experimental results presented have shown that
the return loss of the new antenna is better than 10 dB and the
gain is between 9 and 11 dBi within 5.6–6.3-GHz band, which
results in 11% bandwidth. The antenna should find deployment
in 5.8-GHz ISM WLAN applications where total band coverage
and moderately high gain levels are required.
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