ABSTRACT

The paper presents a loaded planar monopole ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna exhibiting quad-band notched characteristics. Triple U-shaped slots over the metallic radiating conductor and a meander line electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure are loaded near the feed line in the proposed design. These three U-shaped slots are responsible for generating triple band notches at 2.80 GHz (2.53–3.15 GHz, Aviation Service Band), 3.37 GHz (3.23–3.68 GHz, WiMAX band), 4.08 GHz (3.92–4.30 GHz, C-band Satellite Downlink), whereas the EBG unit cell placed near the feedline is responsible for creating additional notched band at 5.95 GHz (5.49–6.19 GHz, C-band satellite uplink), respectively. The antenna has very compact size of 0.71λ₀×0.8λ₀×0.03λ₀ and is modeled on FR4 substrate using ANSYS HFSS tool. The antenna without any extra arrangement covers an impedance bandwidth ranging from 2.9 to 10.5 GHz which suitably meets the requirement of UWB applications. However, the proposed antenna integrated with U-shaped slots and EBG-unit cell, filters out four different notched frequencies within working bands without disturbing the performance of the monopole antenna. Moreover, the designed antenna is compact in size with improved performance and having efficient notch controlling capacities. Also, the measured performance of the fabricated prototype is in very good agreement to the simulated counterparts.