A Single-Layer Ultrawideband Microstrip Antenna

A single-layer microstrip antenna for ultrawideband (UWB) applications, in which an array of rectangular microstrip patches was arranged in the log-periodic way and proximity-coupled to the microstrip feeding line, is presented. In order to reduce the number of microstrip patches in the UWB log-periodic arrays, a large scale factor ${rm k}=1.1$ was firstly reported and proved to be highly effective. Furthermore, instead of using an absorbing terminal loading, a novel loss-free compensating stub was proposed. Detailed parameters study was also presented for better understanding of the proposed antennas. The impedance bandwidth (measured ${rm VSWR}≪2.5$ ) of an example antenna with only 11 elements is from 2.26–6.85 GHz with a ratio of about 3.03:1. Both numerical and experimental results show that the proposed antenna has stable directional radiation patterns, very low-profile and low fabrication cost, which are suitable for various broadband applications.