Meandered slot arm loaded electronically tunable microstrip antenna using varactors

A new design of a compact electronically reconfigurable dual frequency dual polarized single feed, meandered slot loaded microstrip antenna is introduced in this paper. A varactor diode is used to switch the operating frequencies considerably, without much affecting the radiation characteristics and gain. The antenna can work with a frequency ratio varying in a wide range from 1.36 to 1.53. The proposed design has an added advantage of size reduction up to 78% and 49% for the two resonating frequencies, compared to standard rectangular patches. The design also gives considerable bandwidth up to 1.55% and 2.08% for the two operating frequencies