Owing to the rapid growth of wireless communication technology, miniature antenna plays a significant role for small size multifunctional devices. In recent days, all communication devices need to be small in size, compact, lightweight, in short should be portable. Moreover portable devices obligatory to operate wider frequency range applications to use in different areas or countries [1, 2]. Due to the availability of unused bandwidth in k/ka band, many researchers are concentrating towards K band application oriented antenna design. Recently, demand of satellite based portable communication devices are increasing noticeably, especially vehicle tracking, portable satellite station, weather forecasting etc. Antenna size reduction with wideband operation capability is still interesting topic for communication engineering researchers. A considerable research effort is being given to antenna miniaturization to integrate with small form factor wideband operating devices without compromising the overall performance [3]. There are several techniques have extensively studied by many researchers, such as using reactive impedance substrate [4], artificial magnetic conductor [5], modified ground plane [6], EBG substrate [7], Metamaterials [8], multilayer Dielectric Substrates [9] etc. Use of ceramic material substrate is one of the effective techniques for antenna miniaturization. Due to higher dielectric constant of the ceramic material substrate, the overall size of antenna can be reduced significantly with our compromising the overall performance [10]. Many antenna technology researchers have comprehensively examined the use of ceramic material substrate for miniature antenna design in their article [11, 12]. A 24×24×4.8 mm~3 low-temperature co-fired-ceramic (LTCC) fractal antenna array designed and achieved 8% bandwidth with 8.9 dBi gain [13]. A miniature antenna was designed using thick truncated textured Ceramic Substrate with the dimension of 14×13.6 mm~2 at 1.88 GHz resonant frequency and obtained 35 MHz of bandwidth [14]. Miniaturized 2×2 and 4×1 stacked patch antenna array designed using using low-temperature co-fired-ceramic (LTCC) substrates and achieved 10.1% bandwidth with 10.35 dBi gain [15]. However, in terms of antenna size reduction or bandwidth enhancement there is still scope to explore the antenna miniaturization with better performance. In this paper, an 8 × 10 mm~2 patch antenna is designed on 1.5 mm thick Aluminium tri-oxide (Al_2O_3) ceramic material substrate and achieved 830 MHz of 10-dB bandwidth, 3.5 dBi peak gain and 97.3% of average radiation efficiency. The proposed antenna is comparatively smaller in size, wider bandwidth, better gain and higher radiation efficiency achieved than the reported antennas. In addition, co and cross polarization of radiation pattern and E-H field current distribution are analyzed.
展开▼
