Analysis and Design of a Novel Coupled Shorting Strip for Compact Patch Antenna With Bandwidth Enhancement

As it is well known, the bandwidth of a patch antenna will decrease with the decrease of antenna size, no matter what size reduction technique is adopted. In this letter, a detailed research on the shorting load, which is a traditional and effective size reduction technique for patch antennas, is done with the help of a transmission line (TL) model of the patch antenna, and a novel design of a coupled shorting strip with bandwidth enhancement is proposed. Based on the research, a compact circularly polarized (CP) patch antenna loaded by the proposed shorting strip is designed for the application of E6 band of COMPASS Navigation System, which has a small electrical size of only λ/7 ×λ/7 ×λ/15 (λ is the wavelength 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 wideband satellite navigation applications.