Design, characterization and integration of electrically small antennas

Abstract

In this thesis, electrically small dielectric resonator antennas have been designed, characterized and fabricated. A robust and reliable method using Tangential Vector Finite Element (TVFE) method has been proposed to compute eigenvalues of an isolated dielectric resonator (DR) accurately, within 1% of error from measured results. The proposed antenna feed structure for linear polarization comprised of a complementary pair of magnetic dipole and magnetic loop, modified to exclude the ground plane. For circular polarization, the feed structure comprised of a meandering magnetic dipole. This compact structure overcomes the impact of a finite a??ground planea?? and has a unidirectional radiation pattern away from the ground plane. Comparison is first carried out between a cylindrical and rectangular DR antenna. Next, a DR antenna with high permittivity values of 38.5 is fabricated and compared with one using a permittivity value of 10.2. Finally, a circular-polarized DR antenna is designed, fabricated and compared with the linear-polarized case.