High Gain 2.4GHz Patch Antenna Array for Rural Area Application

The design and implementation of high gain 2.4GHz patch antenna array for wireless communications application in rural area is presented. The patch antenna array with high gain is expected to minimize the need of tower that almost requires high cost of construction. In order to achieve high gain, the proposed antenna is constructed by 4x4 rectangular patches fed by microstrip line corporate feeding network which is developed using a lambda/4 transformer impedance matching technique. The antenna structure is then deployed on a Flame Retardant ( FR) 4 Epoxy dielectric substrate which the thickness and dielectric constant of 1.6mm, and 4.4, respectively. Prior hardware realization, some antenna parameters including return loss, voltage standing wave ratio ( VSWR), radiation pattern, and gain are characterized through simulation to obtain an optimum design of antenna. While from the measurement, it shows that the characteristics of realized patch antenna array have good agreements with the design results in which the realized antenna has the measured gain of 15.59dB at the center frequency with the return loss of 19.52dB which corresponds to VSWR of 1.24 and the bandwidth response of 130MHz ranges from the frequency of 2.31GHz -2.44GHz.