Design of a microstrip-fed monopole antenna with a rectangular slit ground and a rectangular projection strips for dual-band WLAN operations

In this study, a novel dual-band planar monopole antenna for wireless local area network (WLAN) application was designed, fabricated, and measured. The proposed antenna was fabricated on a low-cost, easily available FR4 substrate, which effectively covers both the 2.4GHz and 5.2/5.8 GHz WLAN bands. The proposed antenna consists of two branches, an asymmetric ground plane, a rectangular projection strip, and a rectangular slit in the ground plane. The rectangular projection strip and the rectangular slit in the ground plane were introduced to enhance the performance of the proposed antenna. The obtained numerical results agree well with the experiment data. It was validated that the configuration can meet the demands of WLAN systems and effectively enhanced the impedance bandwidth to 39.7% for the lower band and 23.1% for the upper band when the impedance bandwidth was -10 dB. This paper also presents and discusses the 2D radiation patterns and gains according to the results of the experiment that was conducted.