Radiation characteristics of printed meander antennas

摘要

Meander type antennas have low-profile and are generally smaller than conventional dipoles. In this paper the effect of changing the parameters of a meander dipole on its radiation characteristics is investigated using the FDTD technique. For the antenna without any substrate, it is observed that the E and H-plane patterns are similar to a straight dipole. The gain is larger than that of a straight dipole of the same length. However, gain decreases when the antenna length exceeds about 0.6Λ. The cross-polarization increases with the increase in antenna length for a constant number of meanders. For a constant length when the number of meanders is reduced, the cross-polarization increases. For a meander dipole printed on a dielectric substrate (∊r = 10.2), the H-plane pattern is uniform for an antenna of length L = 0.25Λ, whereas, the pattern is nonuniform (< 2.0 dB) for an antenna of length L = 0.50Λ.