On the Performance of Printed Dipole Antenna With Novel Composite Corrugated-Reflectors for Low-Profile Ultrawideband Applications

An investigation of the performance of printed dipole antenna with finite periodically corrugated-reflectors for low-profile ultrawideband (UWB) applications is presented. According to the relative orientations of the linear-polarized source antenna and the corrugated-reflectors, the problem could be divided into H and E cases. Their fundamental differences and design guidelines are discussed in detail. A novel composite corrugated-reflector based on the combinations of H-type and E-type ones is proposed for the first time, and fully characterized with a UWB source dipole which was optimized in the free space for better comparisons. An example antenna with only 21 mm core profile, composed of a printed UWB dipole, a microstrip balun and a composite corrugated-reflector, has an impedance bandwidth (VSWR < 2.0) of 2.75 GHz to 8.35 GHz. Both numerical and experimental results show that the example antenna also has stable uni-directional radiation patterns and a realized gain of over 6 dB within the frequency band from 2.3 to 6.0 GHz, which could be a decent alternative to the EBG antennas due to significant improvements on pattern and gain bandwidth.