This work presents a passive intelligent surface designed at 2.45 GHz that has the capability of transmitting and reflecting electromagnetic waves that are incident upon it. The proposed surface does not require any circuitry or power source to function. Therefore, it makes a cost-effective and simple intelligent surface. It is a simple metallic structure that has embedded waveguide slots on its surface, allowing the waves to couple for transmission. A prototype of the proposed surface is designed using an aluminum foil and analyzed for both transmission and reflection of the wave. Further, the designed surface is investigated for tuning the directionality of the radiated field from the antenna. For this purpose, a coplanar patch antenna is first designed and then combined with the surface to tune the directionality of the radiated field of this antenna. The outcome of the measured performance validates that the proposed surface has the potential capability of field reconfiguration in wireless communication for Wi-Fi, WLAN, and Bluetooth applications.

With the development of the communication field, more and more communication devices need multiple single-frequency antennas to work simultaneously. However, using multiple single-frequency antennas results in larger sizes. The miniaturized and dual-band communication system has become a new development trend. This paper designs a dual-band filtering patch antenna based on a multimode resonator, which is cascaded. The filter resonator part adopts step impedance resonance for branch shunt design, which can flexibly control the center frequency of two frequency bands. The filtering antenna utilizes a dual-layer substrate structure and achieves an integrated design through coupling probe feeding. This reduces the horizontal dimensions and improves miniaturization. Multiple radiation nulls are introduced outside the two-passband, and roll-off characteristics are evident. In addition, this design realizes high selectivity in the operating band. The antenna has large gains of 1.71 dBi and 6.25 dBi. It has good filtering and radiation characteristics.

With the increasing demand for smarter antenna design in advanced technology applications, well-designed antennas have been an important factor in enhancing system performance. Most traditional antenna design requires multiple iterations and extensive testing to produce a final product. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have been used as an alternative to predict the optimal design parameters, but the outcome depends highly on the ML model efficiency. With recent development in machine learning algorithms and the availability of data for antenna design, we investigated different machine learning algorithms for optimizing the output strength of three basic antennae by analyzing the signal strength of the antenna for various antenna parameters. Different regression-based ML models were used to learn the behaviors and efficiency of three different antennas and to predict the output strength (S11) for different ranges of frequencies. The experiment compared and analyzed these ML regression algorithms for three different antennas: shot antenna, patch antenna, and bowtie antenna. In addition, the paper also provides comparison of ensemble ML models for performance analysis using the best three ML algorithms from the preliminary study. This study optimizes antenna parameters and quicker and smarter antenna design procedure using ML algorithms as compared to traditional design methods.

An intra-band pattern-corrected decoupling vertical conducting wall is realized by dielectric substrate with conductor cladding on both side wall between two tightly spaced H-plane microstrip patches with λ0/20 edge-to-edge spacing. The wall is grounded and two symmetrical slots are etched on the vertical substrate. The measured results agree with the simulations, showing that the slotted vertical wall reduces the mutual coupling within the bandwidth to −30 dB and corrects the radiation beam tilt to be within −4.5° to 3° from the broadside direction. A gain reduction of 0.6 dB is observed compared to the gain without the slotted decoupling wall.

The major component for the effective functioning of airborne unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an antenna. The unified integration of an antenna with UAVs without disturbing the other components of UAVs, compact size, thin, and wideband antennas are preferred. Based on these prerequisites, a low-profile and a wideband antenna is presented for autonomous UAVs for C-band applications. The antenna is designed on an extremely thin substrate of size 0.01λ0 without compromising the antenna's broad bandwidth. The antenna structure comprises a corrugated U-shaped patch, a few parasitic patches along with the partial ground. Initially, only a single mode was excited using a U-shaped patch, then further on introducing a few more parasitic patches along with corrugations in a U-shaped patch other modes were also coupled leading to enhancement in the bandwidth of the antenna. The proposed antenna along with a 2 × 2 quad-port multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antenna is designed and fabricated. The measured results are found to be in good agreement with the simulated results. A broad bandwidth of 74.5% (4.1–9.0 GHz) with 5.02 dBi peak gain at 6.6 GHz is exhibited by the fabricated MIMO antenna. Thus, the designed antenna proves to be an effective candidate for UAV-based C-band applications.

We propose simple designs of compact patch antennas with bandwidth enhancement. Firstly, an inverted “L” strip is loaded onto the corner of one radiating patch edge to create an additional resonant mode which can be combined with that one of the conventional patch to enhance the operating bandwidth. Secondly, the “L” strip is replaced by inverted “T” strip to improve further the bandwidth by creating two adjustable resonant modes. The two proposed patch antennas have the particularity of enhancing the bandwidth significantly without increasing their profile and their overall sizes. Two antenna prototypes are fabricated and tested. Measurements reveal that the patch antenna loaded with “L” strip has stable radiation characteristics with 5.2 times enhancement in the relative bandwidth compared with a conventional patch antenna. The antenna loaded with inverted “T” strip has wider bandwidth (6.25 times wider than the conventional patch) and covers the operating band 5.07–5.89 GHz (15%) with measured peak gain and peak efficiency of 6.25 dBi and 78%, respectively. The proposed antennas are easy to fabricate, have a low-profile, and exhibit good performances which make them good candidates to use in real wireless applications.

To prevent far-field radiation characteristics degradation while increasing bandwidth, an attempt has been made to design and fabricate a microstrip antenna. An electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structure, including a layer of a metallic ring on a layer of Rogers 4003C substrate, is used. For a better design, a patch antenna with and without the EBG substrate has been simulated. The results show that the bandwidth can be improved up to 1.6 GHz in X-band by adding the EBG substrate. Furthermore, using this structure, a dual-band antenna was obtained as well. Finally, to validate the simulation results, a comparison has been done between simulation data and experimental results which demonstrate good agreement.

A novel planar dual-band bow-tie slotted patch antenna backed by high-impedance surface (HIS) is designed at 2.5 and 3.5 GHz for wireless application. The antenna employs coplanar waveguide fed patch and bow-tie slot as radiating elements. The bow-tie slot enables dual-band operation for the antenna. The HIS is made asymmetric in design to make it polarization dependent. This polarization-dependent HIS is eventually designed to reflect circularly polarized waves from linearly polarized incident waves.

A novel low profile dual band patch antenna is presented. It consists of a composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH TL) unit cell gap coupled with the radiating edge of a rectangular patch antenna. The dual band behavior is achieved by coupling the zeroth order resonance mode of CRLH TL and TM10 mode of the patch antenna. It is shown that frequency ratio can be changed by varying the gap between the patch and CRLH TL unit cell. The proposed configuration enables frequency reconfigurability by changing the CRLH TL unit cell using a switch. A prototype of the antenna having frequency ratio f2/f1 = 1.08 is designed and fabricated. The proposed antenna shows measured S11 ≤ −10 dB bandwidth of 100 and 50 MHz at resonance frequencies of f1 = 4.84 and f2 = 5.22 GHz, respectively. A 2 × 2 dual band CRLH TL coupled patch array is also presented, showing more than 12.7 dBi gain at both resonance frequencies.

This paper presents an original solution to design a compact dual circularly polarized isoflux antenna for nanosatellite applications. This kind of antenna has been previously designed in our laboratory, for a single circular polarization. This antenna is composed of a dual circularly polarized feed and a choke horn antenna. This feed is a cross-shaped slot in the ground plane, which provides coupling between a patch and a ring microstrip line with two ports. It is located at the center of a choke horn antenna. The simulated antenna presents an axial ratio <3 dB and a realized gain close to 0 dB over a 400 MHz bandwidth (8.0–8.4 GHz) at the limit of coverage, i.e. 65° whatever the azimuth angle (φ) and the port. A 20 dB matching for each port and 13 dB isolation characteristics between the two ports have been achieved on this bandwidth. It has been realized and successfully measured.

Patch antennas with a meandering slot and different distributions of grounded metallic vias are presented in this paper. The meandering slot is adopted to stimulate dual-band operation, while the number and position of the grounded metallic vias are suggested to achieve different radiation performances. The characteristics are analyzed in detail where we find that the existence of the vias also improves the impedance matching. Four samples are designed, where dual-band with both linear polarization, dual-band with circular- and linear-polarization, and single band with linear polarization are obtained, respectively. The samples are finally fabricated and the measurement results agree well with the simulation results.

This paper proposes a combined harvesting system to improve the efficiency and flexibility of autonomous wireless network nodes, supplied by means of wireless power transfer technique. In particular, a mixed system for electromagnetic (EM) and thermal energy harvesting (EH), conceived for passive nodes of wireless sensor networks and radio frequency (RF) identification tags, is described. The proposed system aims at increasing the effectiveness and the efficiency of the EH system by integrating an antenna and a rectifier with a thermo-electric generator (TEG) able to perform thermal EH. The energy provided by the thermal harvester is exploited twice: to increase the rectifier efficiency by providing a voltage usable to improve the bias condition of the rectifying diode, and to provide additional dc energy, harvested for free. Ultimately, a great efficiency improvement, especially at low incident RF power, has been observed. The design methodology and the EM performance of a quarter-wavelength patch antenna, integrated with the TEG are resumed. Then, a test campaign to evaluate the thermal EH performance has been carried out. Afterward, a rectifier with variable bias voltage, operating at the same frequency of the antenna, has been opportunely designed to exploit the harvested thermal energy to bias the diode. A measurement campaign has been then carried out to test the efficiency increment obtained and to validate the proposed solution.

A novel calibration network for patch antennas is proposed. We introduce magnetically coupled in-situ probes, which excite the fundamental patch mode. In that way, finite array effects and mutual coupling are taken into account, providing the opportunity for accurate online calibration of active antenna terminals. The specific advantages of the approach are demonstrated for linearly polarized patch antennas. Realization aspects of the multilayer antenna are discussed and the effect of some fabrication imperfections are investigated. Measured S-parameters as well as radiation simulation results of a single patch with the integrated probes are presented. Based on simulation of antenna arrays with in-situ probes the calibration accuracy is given in theory.