A differentially-fed magneto-electric dipole antenna for UWB applications

An ultra-wideband differentially-fed magneto-electric dipole (ME dipole) antenna with unidirectional radiation pattern is proposed in this paper. A novel differential feeding structure is designed to provide an ultra-wideband impedance matching. A stable gain of ~7.7±1.4dBi is realized by modifying the geometry of the magneto-electric dipole and using a rectangular cavity, instead of a normal ground plane, as a reflector. The antenna can achieve an impedance bandwidth 114% for VSWR<;2 from 2.95GHz to 10.73GHz. Also, stable radiation patterns with low cross polarization, low back radiation and symmetric E- and H-plane patterns are obtained across the operating frequency band. Moreover, the phase center is stable over the operating frequencies, which is necessary for the time domain UWB pulse transmission. The proposed antenna, which is small in size, can be constructed easily by using PCB fabrication technique.