A compact dual-band planar monopole antenna using fractal rings and A Y-shaped feeding transmission line

Abstract

This paper presents a novel design approach of a compact dual-band monopole antenna with an overall size of 18.9x13x1.6mm3. The proposed antenna is composed of a fractal ring shaped patch fed by a Y-shaped transmission line on the top side of the substrate and a second fractal ring along with a U-shaped ground plane on the bottom side. The second fractal ring, identical to the radiating ring, is loaded and a rectangular slot is etched at the top side of the ground plane respectively, to achieve dual-band characteristic and improve the impedance matching. The effect of standard ground-plane (SGP) of a laptop computer is incorporated in the design; the antenna is mounted on a SGP in order to investigate its performance. The antenna covers widely the frequency bands of the WLAN 2.4 GHz (2.2–2.52 GHz) and WiMAX 3.5 GHz (3.32–4.35 GHz), and exhibits an omnidirectional radiation pattern in the H-plane and a monopole like radiation pattern in the E-plane. A good agreement between the simulated and measured results indicates that the proposed dual-band antenna design is suitable for WLAN/WiMAX applications.