Impedance Matched Ferrite Layers as Ground Plane Treatments to Improve Antenna Wide-Band Performance

In low-profile applications, ground plane backing significantly degrades antenna performance when the electrical height is a small fraction of a wavelength. An approach to suppress the destructive interference from the ground plane reflections is to employ absorbing layers of ferrite materials. In this paper, we introduce a means to also control and utilize the mode excited in these finite ferrite layers to recover antenna performance at ultra/very high frequencies. Experimental verification is provided using commercial ferrite materials.