A novel broadband magnetoelectric antenna

A broadband antenna based on magnetoelectric dipole is proposed. The proposed antenna is composed of a bowtie‐shaped electric dipole and an elliptical ring antenna that works as a magnetic dipole. For a broadband performance, a microstrip‐to‐coplanar stripline transition balun is used to excite the antenna. All of them are printed on the same plane perpendicular to the ground. To validate the design, prototypes of the proposed antenna have been fabricated and measured. The measurement results show that the antenna has a wide impedance bandwidth of 66.7% (2.45–4.90 GHz) for voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) less than 2 and a gain of 6.0–7.3 dBi over the operating frequency band. Meanwhile a high front‐to back ratio better than 16 dB over the operating frequency is achieved. The agreements between the simulation and measurement results indicate that the proposed antenna is suitable for wireless communication systems and phased array systems. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 25:213–218, 2015.