An electrically small frequency reconfigurable antenna for DVB-H

Abstract

An electrically small frequency-reconfigurable antenna with a very wide tuning band is proposed. The antenna consists in a printed meandered monopole antenna loaded by varactor diodes. The radiating element has a size of 15*15*3 mm3 and is mounted on a 230*130mm2 ground plane. A thick block of a commercial magneto-dielectric material is inserted over the double-meandered antenna as a superstrate This antenna is able to maintain a return loss below -10 dB over 8 MHz bandwidth reconfigurable channel from 450 to 900 MHz without using any external matching circuit. The measured tuning range of the fabricated antenna reaches from 470-862MHz covering the whole frequency band specification of the DVB-H standard.