A low-profile antenna mounted on metal plane for digital terrestrial television reception

Recently, many countries are switching their terrestrial television broadcasting from analog to digital and the demand of TV reception increases for mobile devices and automobiles. The antenna for this purpose is required to be compact, light-weight. It is also desirable that the antenna can work even located close to neighbouring objects, especially metallic ones, so as to be installed into narrow spaces. In this paper, we propose a compact antenna for digital terrestrial television reception. The antenna is made of film and is arranged to maintain its performance even it is mounted in close vicinity of metals. The antenna is based on a loop antenna in which meandering structure is applied for the miniaturization purpose. Multiple short-bars are put on the meandering structure for the bandwidth enhancement. The antenna has a planar structure with a dimension of 56 × 83 mm² and performs well even it is mounted on a metal plane with a small gap of 5 mm. The antenna operates in a frequency range from 470 to 890 MHz, which covers the frequency range of most digital terrestrial television systems in the world, such as the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) (470-770 MHz), the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) (470-860 MHz) and the Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) (470-890 MHz).