Extremely Low-Profile Monopolar Microstrip Antenna with Wide Bandwidth

In this paper, we propose a new monopolar microstrip antenna for a high-speed moving swarm sensor network. The proposed antenna shows an extremely thin substrate thickness supported with an omni-directional radiation pattern and wide operation frequency bandwidth. First, to achieve the low-profile monopolar microstrip antenna, the symmetrical center feeding network and the gap-coupled six arrayed patches which form a hexagonal microstrip radiator were utilized. The partially loaded ground-slots under the top patches were employed to improve the radiation performance and adjust the impedance bandwidth. Second, to obtain the broad bandwidth of the low-profile monopolar microstrip antenna, the degenerated non-fundamental TM(02) modes, that is, even and odd TM(02) modes, were carefully analyzed. To verify the feasibility of the degenerated TM(02) mode operation, the parametric study of the proposed antenna was theoretically investigated and implemented with the optimized parameter dimensions. Finally, the fabricated antenna showed a 0.254 mm-thick substrate and demonstrates 1.5-wavelength resonant monopolar radiation with broad impedance bandwidth of 855 MHz and its factional bandwidth of 15.24% at the resonant frequency of 5.57 GHz.