Split-ground compact ultra-wide band patch antenna for wireless LTE/UMTS operations

Abstract

The lower band and mid band ‘5G’ are known to use the frequencies in the range of 600 MHz – 6 GHz worldwide, especially 3.5GHz to 4.2GHz. A new modified multi slot compact planar ultra-wideband Microstrip patch antenna with a split ground plane has been proposed in this paper. The size of the antenna occupies volume of 34x30x1.7 (1734 mm^3) which has been designed on a FR4 epoxy substrate with dielectric constant of 4.4. In order to provide dual wideband characteristics, a ‘T and G ’shaped slots with split ground plane using line feeding structure has been used. The effects on the return losses v/s frequency for the antenna using different substrates with varying dielectric constants for the same dimensions has been studied in this paper. The proposed antenna operates in dual band with first band being a narrow band ranging from 1.92GHz to 2.06GHz and the second band is an ultra-wide band which ranges from 3.40 GHz to 9.6 GHz. The split ground plane and slot size variations in the T and G slot geometry helps in retrieving the dual bands. The proposed antenna is covering applications from LTE band No 40, UMTS IMT-2000, Wimax (3.5/5.55GHz), ISM WLAN 5.2/5.8GHz and RFID etc. The direct line feeding method which uses a 50Ω line with width of W=3mm has been used for the micro-strip line. With split ground plane, coupling between the slots plays role for achieving the good bandwidth. The analysis of return loss (dB), bandwidth, VSWR (Voltage Standing Wave Ratio) of patch antenna with different substrates and variation of the sizes of slots in shapes has been performed using HFSS tool [12] and results has been studied in this paper.