Design of a 2.4-GHz printed meander-line antenna for USB WLAN-card with notebook-PC housing

In WLAN card design, the typical type is the PCMCIA WLAN card and many printed antennas have been reported for the PCMCIA card applications [I-31. Currently there is a miniaturized WLAN card (about the same size of the small portable RAM disk) which uses the USB connector to be plugged into the notebook PC. The USB connector can be bended and hence the antenna on the WLAN card can have different position and orientation. This paper presents a 2.4-GHz meander-line printed antenna for WLAN applications. The HFSS 3-D EM simulator is used for design simulation. The antenna is fabricated on a double-sided FR-4 printed circuit board for experimental measurements. The effect of the notebook housing on the USB-WLAN card is also studied.