A Novel Compact Wideband Patch Antenna for GNSS Application

As it is well known, the bandwidth of antenna will decrease with the decrease of antenna size and this feature limits the design of compact Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) patch antenna (1.1–1.6 GHz). In this communication, a novel wideband technique based on the mode analysis on the shorting load patch antenna is proposed. By adjusting the position and the size of the shorting load structure, the dominant resonant mode of patch antenna(TM₁₀) is divided into two secondary modes and these two modes are combined together to form a wide operating band. It is proved that this new method has better bandwidth enhancement effect than the traditional methods. By utilizing this proposed method, a compact circularly polarization wideband patch antenna is designed for GNSS application, which has a small electrical size of only <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.2\lambda _{0}\times 0.2\lambda _{0}\times 0.05\lambda _{0.}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>(<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\lambda _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the wavelength of low band in free space.) The simulated and measured results show that the proposed antenna has good and stable performance over the whole operating band, which means that it is quite an ideal compact antenna used for GNSS satellite navigation applications.