Microstrip antenna arrays have found broad applications in recent years and the reduction of mutual coupling is an important criterion in their design. In this paper, FDTD method is applied to analyze the probe fed patch antennas and the simulated results agree well with the experimental results in [1]. The mutual coupling of patch antennas on high dielectric constant substrate [2], which is of growing interest due to its compact size and conformability with MMIC, is characterized in details. Such antennas have larger mutual coupling than antennas on low permittivity substrate because of the pronounced surface waves. The electromagnetic hand-gap structure introduced in [3] is then employed to inhibit the surface waves so that the mutual coupling is greatly reduced.
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