Design and fabrication of a flexible Minkowski fractal antenna for VHF applications

Author

Lee, E.C. ; Soh, P.J. ; Hashim, N.B.M. ; Vandenbosch, G.A.E. ; Volski, V. ; Adam, I. ; Mirza, H. ; Aziz, M.Z.A.A.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. & Commun. Eng., Univ. Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), Kuala Perlis, Malaysia

fYear

2011

fDate

11-15 April 2011

Firstpage

521

Lastpage

524

Abstract

This work investigates the design of a flexible Minkowski fractal antenna. Two potential materials are included for examination - conductive copper tape and ShieldIt conductive textile. Both are designed and simulated to achieve a satisfactory resonance at the Very High Frequency (VHF) band for Land Mobile Radio (LMR) application through proper structure segmentation and iteration. Optimization concludes that the antenna is suitably fed using an L-shaped folded ground plane, with a Minkowski radiator of the third iteration (n3). The better performing material, i.e conductive copper tape, is used to fabricate an antenna. It is observed through measurements that the wearable antenna reaches a gain of larger than 0 dB and an efficiency of 48 %, with a size of less than 0.5 m.

Keywords

VHF antennas; copper; fractal antennas; mobile radio; wearable antennas; Cu; L-shaped folded ground plane; Minkowski radiator; ShieldIt conductive textile; VHF applications; conductive copper tape; flexible Minkowski fractal antenna; land mobile radio; very high frequency band; wearable antenna; Antenna measurements; Antenna radiation patterns; Dipole antennas; Fractals; Gain;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP), Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on

Conference_Location

Rome

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0250-1

Type

conf

Filename

5782481