A wideband printed dipole antenna with an integrated balun feed is given. To further get larger bandwidth capabilities of this antenna, a novel low-cost smaller unit-cell planar photonic bandgap (PBG) structure is etched onto the antenna surface, and a better dipole antenna is fabricated. Through optimizing the sizes of PBG structure, a 56.7% bandwidth is obtained where voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) is less than 1.5 while a 36% bandwidth is obtained from initial structure. Agreement between calculations and measurements is vend good. The result indicates that the novel design may obtain better wide-band characteristic. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51: 1862-1865, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI 10.1002/mop.24466