Probe‐fed microstrip antennas loaded with very high‐permittivity ceramics

This article reports the feasibility study of miniaturizing probe‐fed microstrip patch antennas by dielectric loading. The loading materials are barium tetratitanate ceramics of very high dielectric constant (ε_r = 38, 80). It is shown that, simply through loading, the antenna sizes are greatly reduced; however, the antenna performances are deteriorated. For instance, the antenna gain becomes lower. Then enhancement of the antenna performances follows. A substrate–superstrate structure is used to recover the gain. Both the experiments and the finite‐difference time‐domain (FDTD) simulations demonstrate that the gain and impedance bandwidth can be retrieved such that they are comparable to those of conventional microstrip antennas loaded with low permittivity materials (ε_r < 3). © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2006.