Wideband Microstrip Dipole Antenna Design for WLAN/WiMAX Applications

Recently, microstrip antennas are preferred in all areas of wireless communication, due to their advantages such as low volume coverage, light weight, surface compatibility, high cost requirements and easy production etc. The main disadvantage of these antennas is their narrow band performance (~11%). In the literature, there are some wideband microstrip antenna designs. These broadband characteristics are obtained by changing the antenna geometry or by adding new parasitic patches to the antenna elements. In this study, a classical wideband microstrip dipole antenna (MDA) design which can be used in WLAN/WiMAX applications (covering the bands 2.4–2.5 GHz and 2.5–3.5 GHz) is introduced. The proposed antenna has a pair of twisted strip which are placed asymmetrically near the feed of the dipole element with a length of 52 mm (~λ/2). Also a pair of square loop elements is placed on a sublayer. The proposed MDA has a resonance between 2.06-3.72 GHz with a bandwidth of 57%. The antenna has a directive radiation pattern with a gain of 6.49-3.98 dBi.