| Abstract: | A new lightweight multilayer mushroom EBG is proposed to significantly improve the isolation between collocated aircraft L‐band blade monopole antennas. Isolation improvement between two L‐bands (960‐1220 MHz) blade monopoles of nearly 20 dB is obtained with a three‐layer EBG design without requiring any redesigning or tuning of the antennas. Since the proposed EBG structure only contains very thin dielectric sheets and foam substrates it would be a lightweight structure. Moreover, the EBG being a stand‐alone structure from the antenna it can be designed, built, and placed between the antennas as an add‐on device to significantly improve antenna isolation over a relatively wide bandwidth (25%). An experimental EBG structure was built and tested demonstrating wideband isolation improvement performance. |
