Investigation on placement sensitivity of meandered dipole performance for RFID systems

Most RFID antennas are fundamentally some variant of a meandered dipole. An investigation is detailed of the performance of two different meandered dipoles when they are placed in free space, on a lossy dielectric, and on a large conducting plane. Even though the second meandered dipole has a reflecting plane incorporated into the design in an attempt to isolate the antenna from placement effects, both meandered dipoles exhibit widely varied performance for the three environments tested.