A quarter-wave U-shaped patch antenna with two unequal arms for wideband and dual-frequency operation

A wideband and dual-frequency quarter-wave U-shaped patch antenna with two unequal arms on FR4 substrate is presented. The U-shaped patch antenna is fed electromagnetically by another coaxially-fed patch on the same layer, which operates at a higher frequency band. In this paper, we first proposed a new technique to obtain two closely staggered resonant modes to achieve a wide impedance bandwidth using two unequal arms of the U-shaped patch for the lower band. For the substrate thickness = 5, 7.5 and 11 mm, the measured bandwidths of the antennas operating around at 900 MHz are 7%, 10%, and 18%, respectively. Then, we modify the coaxially-fed patch so that both bands are wide in bandwidth. The resulting antenna operating at 900 and 1800-MHz bands with the substrate thickness 11 mm has a measured impedance bandwidth of 13.3% and 20 respectively. This thickness corresponds to 0.033 free-space wavelength at 900 MHz. The far-field radiation patterns are stable in the two operating bands. The proposed antenna is simple in structure compared with the regular stacked or coplanar parasitic patch antennas. It is highly suitable for indoor mobile communications.