Comparison of fabric and embroidered dipole antennas

Flexible antennas are an important component for wearable wireless devices of the future. A comparison between fabric and embroidered dipole antennas is performed to evaluate the suitability of different conductors as building blocks of textile antennas. The dipole antennas are fed by a microstrip line to coplanar strips transition, and connected through thin metallic wires. A gain of 1.7 dB is measured for the silver fabric antenna and degrades to -4.3 dB and -5.8 dB for two different embroidered antennas where the importance of the embroidery strategy is highlighted as pathway to potential better performance.