Printed fractal monopole antenna array for WLAN

This paper presents the design of a single feed multiband printed monopole antenna array using the 2^nd generation of the Minkowski fractal geometry. The multiband operation is achieved by a suitable chosen of the size and iteration of the fractal geometry, which is optimized using the EM simulation tool Ansoft HFSS. During this work, it is found that adding a rectangular stub on the ground plane, the impedance match of the antenna can be improved with little influence on the original resonant frequencies. This finding has been confirmed by both simulation and measurement results. Meanwhile, the antenna array on a PDA size substrate was also designed and fabricated. The experimental results show that it can operate from 2.32 to 2.49 and from 5.1 to 5.88 GHz, which covers the required bands for IEEE 802.11a/b/g (2.41-2.48 GHz, 5.15-5.35 GHz and 5.725-5.875 GHz) applications. Measurements indicate that the maximum gain of this printed monopole array can reach 2.3 dBi at lower band and 5.6 dBi at upper band. The simulation results show that the radiation efficiency of this antenna array is 86% at 2.4 GHz, 82% at 5.2 GHz and 89% at 5.8 GHz.