B8. Reduced size mushroom like EBG for antennas mutual coupling reduction

In this paper a modified mushroom-like electromagnetic band gap structure is utilized to suppress the surface waves between two transmit-receive antennas with small separation. The two antennas are operating at 5.8 GHz for WiMAX applications. The compactness of the mushroom-like EBG structure is increased with more mutual coupling reduction between the microstrip antennas. The measured results demonstrates that better than 32 dB between the edges of two elements with 10 mm separation (0.19λ₀) has been achieved. The proposed electromagnetic band gap structure has been reduced by 15% compared to conventional one and the mutual coupling has been reduced by 8 dB. The theoretical study, full wave simulations, and experimental measurements are presented. A good agreement has been achieved between the presented results.