Study of printed elliptical/circular slot antennas for ultrawideband applications

Two novel designs of planar elliptical slot antennas are presented. Printed on a dielectric substrate and fed by either microstrip line or coplanar waveguide with U-shaped tuning stub, the elliptical/circular slots have been demonstrated to exhibit an ultrawideband characteristic. The performances and characteristics of the proposed antennas are investigated both numerically and experimentally. Based on these analyses, an empirical formula is introduced to approximately determine the lower edge of the -10 dB operating bandwidth. It is also shown that these antennas are nearly omnidirectional over a majority fraction of the bandwidth.