Design of a compact biconical antenna for UWB applications

This paper presents the study, design, fabrication, and measurement of a vertically polarized compact biconical antenna that can be used as a reference antenna. The study from simulation results suggest that the optimal antenna shall have the flare angle of 60° which gave the most stable vertical beamwidth in the broadside direction and the fewest ripples in the main beam region, a cone length of one wavelength of center frequency (7 GHz) to make the antenna most compact, and the feed gap was 0.5 mm. The return loss was -10 dB on average across the bandwidth. The simulation results were validated by the experiments. The fabricated antennas worked across 2-12 GHz as desired, and were used as reference antennas especially for UWB 3.1-10.6 GHz applications.