896 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO.

3, MARCH 2008

Printed Omni-Directional UWB Monopole Antenna

With Very Compact Size
Qi Wu, Ronghong Jin, Junping Geng, and Min Ding

Abstract—A compact rectangular monopole with an equal-width ground

plane is presented. This novel structural configuration could significantly
improve its radiation performance and decrease its size. The feeding
structure composed of a trident-shaped strip and a tapered impedance
transformer is presented and discussed. Its impedance bandwidth, defined
by measured VSWR less than 2, is from 2.75 to 16.2 GHz with a ratio
of about 5.9:1. Both numerical and experimental results show that the
proposed monopole antenna has stably omni-directional H-plane radiation
patterns with low cross-polarization level within its impedance bandwidth.
This novel monopole antenna has ultrawide impedance bandwidth, very
compact size (30 mm*8 mm), low fabrication lost, and omni-directional
H-plane radiation patterns, which are suitable for various broadband
applications.
Index Terms—Equal-width ground, omni-directional, printed monopole,
ultrawideband (UWB).

I. INTRODUCTION
Planar monopole antennas have been used in wireless communi-
cation systems for a long time due to their simple structures, conve-
nient feeding mechanisms and low fabrication cost. However, their lim-
ited impedance bandwidth should be further improved for ultrawide-
band (UWB) applications. Structures with a simple bevel [1], [2], with
shorting pins [3], using smooth rounded elements [4]–[6] and using
fractal elements [7], [8] have been introduced for the bandwidth en-
hancement. Furthermore, a planar hexagonal monopole antenna has
demonstrated an impedance bandwidth with a ratio of over 37:1 [10].
A planar monopole antenna is usually composed of a monopole el-
ement and a finite ground plane which is several times wider than the
monopole element. However, this typical structural configuration of a
planar monopole antenna could greatly increase its width due to the
large ground plane. Besides, its maximum beam direction could also
alter significantly in its operating frequency band due to the contribu-
tions of the finite ground plane and the monopole element. Further-
more, as the operating frequency increases, its H-plane radiation pat-
terns could not keep omni-directional as its width could be compa-
rable with the wavelength at higher operating frequencies. In order to
improve the radiation characteristics of planar monopoles, some tech-
niques such as using two orthogonal elements [11], using a step-shaped
structure [12], using the feeding mechanism with two sleeves [13],
and using multi-crossed-elements [14] have been introduced. How-
ever, these techniques mentioned above would increase their sizes, total
weights, fabrication complexity or decrease the impedance bandwidth,
which are undesirable in broadband wireless communication systems.
This paper proposes a compact rectangular monopole with an equal-
width ground plane. This novel structural configuration could signifi-
cantly improve its radiation performance and decrease the antenna size.
A trident-shaped feeding strip and a tapered impedance transformer
have been applied for impedance bandwidth enhancement. Both nu-
merical and experimental results show that the proposed monopole an-
tenna with very compact size has a significantly improved radiation
performance and offers very wide impedance bandwidth.
Manuscript received May 15, 2007; revised August 26, 2007.
The authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai
Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China (e-mail: wuqi_2004@sjtu.
edu.cn; rhjin@sjtu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2008.917018
Fig. 1. Structural configuration of the proposed antenna and the coordinate
system (dimensions in mm).
II. ANTENNA CONFIGURATION
The proposed antenna is composed of a narrow rectangular
monopole and a finite ground plane which has the same width as the
rectangular monopole, and it’s assumed to be printed on a Teflon-based
substrate with permittivity 2.65 as shown in Fig. 1. This novel struc-
tural configuration could make better use of the valuable substrate
area and decrease the width of the proposed antenna by introducing
the equal-width ground. It should be pointed out that the proposed
antenna always shares the same width W2 as the ground plane in this
design. Furthermore, the modification on the ground plane could also
influence its radiation performance, as we know that the vertical and
horizontal components of its surface currents, for both the monopole
element and the ground plane, contribute to its radiation field as the
co-polarization components and the cross-polarization components,
respectively. In other words, its horizontal radiation patterns are
mainly determined by its vertical surface current distributions if we
neglect the cross-polarization components. Thus a planar monopole
antenna could have stronger radiation in the broadside as the con-
tributions of all the vertical surface currents are in-phase or nearly
in-phase within its impedance bandwidth. Whereas, due to its planar
structure, in some directions the radiation could be much weaker as
the vertical surface currents are out-of-phase. Therefore, the width of
a planar monopole antenna could greatly influence the uniformity of
its H-plane radiation patterns as shown in Table I. From Table I we
could see that the maximum non-uniformity of the H-plane radiation
patterns of the proposed antenna increases nearly-exponentially with
the antenna width W2, thus the uniformity of its H-plane radiation
patterns can be further improved by decreasing its width W2. When its

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 3, MARCH 2008 897

TABLE I
SIMULATED MAXIMUM NON-UNIFORMITY OF THE H-PLANE RADIATION PATTERNS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA
WITHIN THE FREQUENCY RANGE OF 3.1 TO 10.6 GHZ (W1=W2)

TABLE II
SIMULATED MAXIMUM NON-UNIFORMITY OF THE H-PLANE RADIATION PATTERNS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA
WITHIN THE FREQUENCY RANGE OF 3.1 TO 10.6 GHZ (W1 = 8 MM)

Fig. 3. The photograph of the example antenna.

Fig. 4. Simulated and measured VSWR of the proposed monopole antenna.

Fig. 2. Simulated input impedance of the proposed rectangular monopole with

trident-shaped feeding structure (monopole width W1 = 8 mm).
width W2 approaches zero, the proposed monopole antenna actually
operates like a printed thin dipole whose horizontal radiation patterns
are always omni-directional in its impedance bandwidth. However,
a monopole antenna with extremely small width is very hard to be
impedance matched over a wide bandwidth. Therefore, the antenna
width W2 is chosen to be 8 mm in our design due to the tradeoff
between the radiation and impedance matching performance.
It is worthy pointing out that even with the same monopole element,
the maximum non-uniformity of its H-plane radiation patterns could
also be much larger than the corresponding value of Table I if its ground
plane is much wider than the monopole element as most of the reported
UWB monopole antennas have, as Table II shows. When the width of
the monopole element W1 was fixed as 8 mm, the maximum non-uni-
formity could increase slowly with the increase of the ground plane
width W2. Therefore, the proposed monopole antenna, whose ground
plane shares the same width as the monopole element, would be an ex-
cellent choice because of its compact size and omni-directional H-plane
radiation patterns.
The feeding mechanism of the proposed antenna is composed of a
short 50-Ohm microstrip line, a linear tapered impedance transformer,
a short 105-Ohm microstrip line and a trident-shaped strip proposed
898
Fig. 5. Measured H-plane radiation patterns of the proposed antenna:
(a) 3 GHz; (b) 7 GHz; (c) 11 GHz; (d) 15 GHz. Solid line: co-polarization;
dashed line: cross-polarization.
in [9]. The rectangular monopole with a trident-shaped feeding strip is
usually better impedance matched to a 50-Ohm feeding line over than
the identical one with a single feeding mechanism [9]. Fig. 2 shows
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 3, MARCH 2008
Fig. 6. Measured E-plane radiation patterns of the proposed antenna.
the simulated input impedance of the proposed antenna with different
ground width W2. It could be observed that the ground width W2 could
greatly influence the input impedance of the proposed antennas, and
the one with W2 = 8 mm could be better impedance matched to a
105-Ohm feeding line because the variations of its input impedance
are quite small within a wide bandwidth. In other words, because of its
narrow monopole element, a wider ground plane could be useless for
the impedance matching. Finally, a linear tapered transformer is added
to the feeding mechanism for wideband impedance transforming be-
tween the two microstrip feeding lines with different characteristic im-
pedances, thus the proposed antenna could be well impedance matched
over a wide bandwidth as Fig. 4 shows.
All of other parameters of the proposed monopole antenna, as shown
in Fig. 1, have been optimized by using commercial available full-wave
simulation software CST Microwave Studio. It’s also interesting to no-
tice that the optimized width of the trident-shaped strip is 2.7 mm,
which is very close to the value 0.375*W suggested in [9].
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Based on the optimized parameters of the proposed antenna in Fig. 1,
an example antenna was fabricated on a Teflon-based substrate with rel-
ative permittivity "r = 2:65 as shown in Fig. 3. This example antenna
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 3, MARCH 2008
TABLE III
SIMULATED INSERT LOSS OF THE 50 OHMS-105 OHMS MICROSTRIP TRANSITION
that the proposed monopole antenna with very compact size offers a
very wide impedance bandwidth from 2.75 to 16.2 GHz and stably
omni-directional H-plane radiation patterns.
Fig. 7. Simulated and measured gain of the proposed monopole antenna.
has a dimension of 30 mm 2 8 mm 2 8 mm, which is only 34.3% of
a typical rectangular monopole antenna with a microstrip feeding line
in [15]. The impedance bandwidth was measured by using an Agilent
8722ES Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) as shown in Fig. 4. It shows
good agreement between the simulated result and the measured one,
the little difference between them may be caused by the soldering ef-
fect of the SMA connector and its mechanical tolerance, which have
been neglected in our simulations. Its measured impedance bandwidth
defined by VSWR<2 is from 2.75 to 16.2 GHz with a ratio of about
5.9:1.
The measured radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are
shown in Figs. 5 and 6. Within its impedance bandwidth from 2.75
to 16.2 GHz, the H-plane radiation patterns of the proposed antenna
are stably omni-directional with low cross-polarization level. Further-
more, we could notice that the cross-polarization components have
increased a little in the high frequency domain, which indicates that
the optimization function of the trident-shaped strip for nearly uniform
vertical surface current distributions may have approached its limit.
Fig. 7 illustrates the simulated and measured gain of the proposed
monopole antenna, as we can see that its gain is about 2–4 dB in most
of its impedance bandwidth due to its compact size and truncated
ground plane. The gain bandwidth of the proposed antenna is mainly
limited by its low gain below 5 GHz, which may be caused by its small
size and the insert loss of the 50 ohms-105 ohms microstrip transition
as Table III shows. The high insert loss of the microstrip transition
below 5 GHz could be alleviated if more generous space is available
for this transition, which indicates the tradeoff between the antenna
size and its gain bandwidth.
IV. CONCLUSION
A novel printed monopole antenna with a ground plane which has
the same width as the rectangular monopole has been presented. This
novel structural configuration could significantly increase its radiation
performance and decrease its size. The feeding structure including a tri-
dent-shaped sheet and a tapered impedance transformer has been pre-
sented and discussed. Both numerical and experimental results show
899
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