Probe-fed wideband AMC-integrated hexagonal antenna with uniform gain characteristics for WLAN applications

Abstract

Demand of antennas those possess wide radiation bandwidth while operating in S-band for wireless communication systems is increasing day by day. Thick substrates are popular solution to achieve wideband but they lead to frequency shift and suffer from limited gain. A potential technique to overcome the issue is to integrate an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) between dielectric layers of a probe-fed thick substrate antenna as proposed in the paper. A parallel plate capacitor is incorporated to compensate impedance mismatch due to inductive probe. An operating band of 340 MHz is observed between 2.24 and 2.58 GHz for a gain greater than 0 dB while antenna exhibits a peak gain of 6.7 dBi. The proposed low profile AMC integrated hexagonal antenna is easy and economical to fabricate using multilayer printed circuit boards. The square loop AMC is analyzed with different inner widths to estimate the band stop frequency in both TE and TM modes. The phenomenon observed in presence of AMC during design and simulations of S-band antenna are validated with experimental results.