Full band UWB front-end solution incorporating two antennas

Present work shows results obtained during an investigation of front-end part for ultra wideband (UWB) transceiver. Main topic is focused on the hardware supporting European standard that assumes the use of the total UWB frequency band with 5GHz band (4.8-6.3 GHz) cut-off. Typical realization of the front-end part uses single full-band antenna, bandpass filter (BPF) and bandstop filter (BSF). The antenna with the BPF provide frequency selection of total UWB band (3.1-10.6 GHz), while the BSF cuts off the unwanted frequency band at 5 GHz. A solution proposed in this paper is alternative to the typical one. The idea is based on double antenna architecture, where each of the antennas covers correspondent frequency band (low and high bands). Signals from the antennas are combined together either with power combiner or diplexer/duplexer. An analysis and a comparison have been made with these types of the combiners.