Systematic Design of Parasitic Element Antennas—Application to a WLAN Yagi Design

In this letter, we present a synthesis method to design parasitic element antennas in a short and illustrative way without the need of parametric studies. The major aim of this method is to synthesize the antenna radiation pattern in a given direction, i.e., to find the equivalent reactive loads that must satisfy each parasitic element. The chosen structure to validate this principle is a 2.45-GHz Yagi-Uda antenna with surface mounted devices (SMD) acting as the synthesized reactive loads. This antenna has been successfully designed and measured. The SMD components have been introduced to demonstrate that the method is helpful to produce generic design.