A novel ultra-wideband circular slot antenna excited with a dipole element

In this contribution, a novel differentially-fed planar ultra-wideband antenna is presented and discussed in detail. This antenna is intended to operate in the FCC frequency range from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz. It is composed of a circular aperture in ground plane and a broadband dipole element exciting the slot aperture. This combination leads to an outstanding radiation performance with a quite uniform radiation pattern over frequency and a mean gain of 2.9 dBi. The measured return loss of the realized antenna is better than 10 dB from 3.9 GHz to 9.8 GHz including an inevitable balun for characterization, and without the balun the 10 dB bandwidth is extended to 3.4 GHz-11 GHz according to the simulation results. Besides the characterization of the antenna in frequency domain, the time domain behavior is shown and demonstrates the antenna´s capability for impulse based UWB radio.