A Novel UWB Monopole Antenna with Reconfigurable Band Notch Characteristics Based on PIN Diodes

Our design for a novel UWB monopole antenna structure with reconfigurable band notch characteristics based on PIN diodes is presented in this paper. The proposed antenna is comprised of a modified circular patch and a partial ground plane. The band-notch characteristics are achieved by etching a slot on the partial ground plane and inserting three PIN diodes into the slots for adjusting the operating antenna bands. The reconfigurability is achieved by adding three PIN diodes to obtain eight states with UWB, dual and triple operating bands which can be obtained by changing the PIN state from ON to OFF, and vice versa. The proposed design shows a simple biasing process to switch the frequency bands with insignificant gain variation and low radiation efficiency reduction. The reconfigurability of the frequency is accomplished by adjusting the effective slot length through modifying the PIN diodes states at the desired operating bands. The desired operating frequency bands can be obtained by switching the diodes. A systematic parametric study based on a numerical analysis is invoked to verify and refine the proposed performance. The proposed antenna is fabricated on FR-4 substrate with dimensions of 50×60×1 mm3. The proposed antenna performance was tested experimentally and compared to the simulated results from CSTMW based on FIT. Experimental results were in concordance with simulated results. We found that the proposed antenna design had simple geometry and it was easy to control the frequency bands to suit the applications of WiMAX and WiFi systems.