A folded film antenna for digital terrestrial television reception

Recently, many countries are switching their terrestrial television broadcasting from analog to digital and the demand of television reception increases for mobile devices. The antenna for this purpose is required to be compact, light-weight, and operate at the broadband covering the broadcasting frequencies. In this paper, we propose a compact antenna for digital terrestrial television reception. The antenna is made of film with a dimension of 78×56 mm² and operates at the broadcasting frequencies in planar form. The antenna is further optimized to maintain the performance when it is compactly folded to a dimension of 78 × 20 × 4 mm³. A fabricated prototype antenna demonstrates that the folded antenna operates in a frequency range from 470 to 890 MHz, which covers the frequency range of most digital terrestrial television systems in the world, such as the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) (470-770 MHz), the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) (470-860 MHz), the Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) (470-860 MHz) and the Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) (470-890 MHz).