Dual-element antenna for DVB-H terminal

In this work, the feasibility of multi-element antennas for DVB-H receivers is studied. A small dual-element antenna based on so-called coupling element technique is designed and manufactured for a DVB-H terminal. In order to cover the whole DVB-H band the band is divided into two sub-bands, which are then separately matched using dual-resonant matching circuits. The designed antenna fulfills the DVB-H realized gain specification with about 2.5 dB margin. The performance of the new antenna was evaluated in a realistic usage environment using a computational antenna evaluation tool called MEBAT. Using the MEBAT results, the attainable mutual information was calculated and the results of the designed dual-element antenna were compared with the results of a single-element antenna with the same total volume as the dual-element antenna. It was noticed that two to four times higher mutual information values are obtained with the proposed dual-element antenna in a 2 x 2 MIMO configuration than with the reference single-element antenna in a SISO case.