Thermal loss in high-Q antennas

Tunable antennas are very promising for future generations of mobile communications, where antennas are required to cover a wide range of operating bands. This reported work was aimed at characterising the loss mechanism of tunable antennas. Tunable antennas typically exhibit a high quality factor (Q), which can lead to thermal loss due to the conductivity of the metal. The investigation shows that copper loss is non-negligible for high-Q values. In the proposed design, the copper loss is 2 dB, for a Q of 260 at 700 MHz.