A Dual Band Printed F Antenna using a Trap with small band separation

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost dual-band printed F-antenna using traps on an FR4 substrate, effectively managing small frequency separation and component tolerances for applications in the 865-870 MHz and 902-928 MHz bands.

Contribution

It introduces a novel placement of the low band section to improve trap LC component tolerance handling in dual-band antenna design.

Findings

Achieved dual-band operation at 865-870 MHz and 902-928 MHz

Implemented on low-cost FR4 substrate

Enhanced in-band return loss despite small frequency separation

Abstract

Trap antenna is well known method and has many applications. With this method, trap(s) are used on antenna to block currents of some frequencies and so electrically divide the antenna into multiple segments and thus one antenna can work on multiple frequencies. In this paper, trap antenna method is used to design a dual band Sub GHz printed F-antenna. The antenna is printed on FR4 board to achieve low cost solution. The two bands are 865-870 MHz and 902-928 MHz. The challenge of this design is that the frequency separation of the two bands is very small. In this case, and also the extra section for low frequency band is too small. Then, the influence of trap LC component variation due to tolerance to the two resonant frequencies is big, and so it is difficult to achieve good in band return loss within the LC tolerance. This is the main difficulty of this design. The problem is solved by placing the low band section away from the end of the antenna.