Very compact UWB CPW-fed fractal antenna using modified ground plane and unit cells

A compact printed monopole antenna is presented consisting of a fractal radiating patch, which is excited with a coplanar waveguide. It is shown that with the inclusion of two pairs of notches in the ground plane, can extend the antenna's performance for ultrawideband (UWB) applications. The antenna's patch is composed of a definite number of fractal rectangular unit cells. The antenna's parameters were investigated to fully determine the effect on its overall characteristics. Hence, the salient parameters from this analysis enabled the optimization of the antenna's performance. Experimental and simulation results demonstrate that the fractal antenna exhibits desired S11 level and radiation pattern characteristics across the whole UWB frequency range. The measured results indicate that the antenna operates over a frequency band from 2.95 to 12.81 GHz with fractional bandwidth of 125% for VSWR ≤ 2. The miniaturized antenna has dimensions of just 14 × 18 × 1 mm3. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:851–854, 2014