Small Antennas Design for 2.4 GHz Applications

In many wireless devices, antennas occupy the majority of the overall size. As compact device sizes become a greater focus in industry, the demand for small antennas escalates. In this thesis, detailed investigations on the design of a planar meandered line antenna with truncated ground plane and 3D dipole antenna at 2.4 GHz (ISM band) are presented. The primary goal of this research is to develop small, low coast, and low profile antennas for wireless sensor applications. The planar meandered line antenna was designed based on a study of different miniaturization techniques and a study of the ground plane effect. The study of the ground plane effect proved that it has a pivotal role on balancing the antenna current. The study of the miniaturization process proved that it affects directly the gain, bandwidth, and efficiency. The antenna efficiency and gain were improved using the truncated ground plane. This antenna has a measured gain of -0.86 dBi and measured efficiency of 49.7%, making it one of the efficient and high gain small antennas. The 3D dipole antenna was designed using a novel method for efficiently exploiting the available volume. This method consists of fabricating the dipole on a cube configuration with opening up the internal volume for other uses. This antenna was tested, and it was found that this antenna has good radiation characteristics according to its occupied volume. Ka of this antenna is 0.55, its measured gain is 1.69 dBi with 64.2% measured efficiency. Therefore, this design is very promising in low-power sensing applications. A Wheeler Cap was designed for measuring the efficiency and the 3-antenna method was used for measuring the designed antennas gain