Signal-to-noise Ratio Improvement of a FM Antenna Using a Non-Foster Circuit

In this paper, we demonstrate a Non-Foster matching method for an electrically small antenna to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of communication link. For the experiment, we used a general FM antenna whose resonance frequency is about 52-57 MHz and a floating type Linvill negative impedance converter(NIC)-based circuit as a Non-Foster matching element. By implementing the Non-Foster circuit to cover FM band, we can achieve a wide bandwidth matching covers 40-200 MHz. Our measurement shows 3-7 dB improvement of SNR for the same bandwidth though there are several spikes which means no improvement of SNR in the band.