Simulation of bandwidth enhancement on the quarter-wave shorted patch by adding a shorting pin

Microstrip antennas have the attractive features of low profile and light weight. They can be made conformal to mounting structures. For microstrip antennas which operate in the lower microwave frequency range, however, their size may be too large for practical applications. Several techniques have been proposed to reduce the size of the conventional half-wave patch. However, these approaches would lead to narrow bandwidth. We apply the shorting pin approach on the shorting edge quarter-wave patch. All the simulation results are demonstrated by the simulation software package, IE3D 7.0. The impedance bandwidth obtained is as much as 16.3% for SWR <2, where the thickness of the patch is only 0.053/spl lambda//sub O/, If only a shorting edge quarter-wave patch has the same thickness and without the shorting pin, the impedance bandwidth is only 9.2%.