IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

7, 2008

229

Enhanced Gain Patch Antenna With a Rectangular

Loop Shaped Parasitic Radiator
Bahadir Yildirim and Bedri A. Cetiner, Member, IEEE

AbstractA new method to increase the gain of a conventional

microstrip patch antenna is presented. A rectangular loop shaped
parasitic radiator placed a specific distance away from the patch
surface increases the gain by about 3.3 dB. The impedance and radiation performances of the proposed antenna are presented with
excellent agreement between simulated and measured results.
Index TermsElectromagnetic analyses, gain measurement, microstrip antennas.

I. INTRODUCTION

N ORDER TO generate a compact, low-profile, lightweight,

and low cost receiver architecture, the antenna elements
must be suitable for integration with monolithic microwave
integrated circuits (MMICs). Microstrip patch antennas with
low profile and planar geometries are suitable for integration.
However, there are two major disadvantages associated with
patch antennas; low gain and a narrow bandwidth. In recent
years, various approaches have been proposed to improve the
gain and bandwidth of microstrip patch antennas. An extensive
survey of all such techniques has been covered in [1]. These
techniques mainly rely on stacked patch configurations, where
the source driven patch interacts with the parasitic patch placed
strategically on top of the fed patch. When the parasitic patch is
closely located to the fed patch, the stacked antenna geometry
has two near-resonant frequencies, the combination of which
results in improved bandwidth performance. When the distance
between the patches is approximately one half-wavelength, these
patches form a leaky resonator whose resonant fields enhance
the antennas gain [2]. A gain enhancement method relying on
a substrate-superstrate resonance technique, where multiple
superstrates with a quarter wavelength thickness are arranged
in a prescribed manner, has also been proposed [3]. Yet another
method that is based on an electronically tunable dielectric
superstrate to improve the radiation characteristics of patch
antennas was also demonstrated [4]. For antenna array applications, patch elements placed into a surface mounted horn frame
providing 3.5 dB improvement in gain have been reported [5].
The most critical factor, regardless of which of these various
techniques or combination of which is employed, is not to lead
to a bulky structure, thereby causing the loss of the very basic
Manuscript received March 4, 2008; revised March 24, 2008. This work was
supported in part by the National Institute of Justice under Grant 2007-IJ-CXK025.
B. Yildirim is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Fatih University, 34500 Istanbul, Turkey (e-mail: byildirim@fatih.edu.tr).
B. A. Cetiner is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322 USA (e-mail: bedri@engineering.usu.
edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2008.922313

Fig. 1. Cross section of the proposed patch antenna with the rectangular loop
;b
;d
;h
;t
:
shaped parasitic radiator: a
(dimensions are in millimeters).

= 50 = 36 = 44 = 10 30 = 1 59

Fig. 2. Top view of the patch antenna. The antenna is in the x 0 y plane: w =
3; w = 1; s = 28; s = 49:5; W = 100 (dimensions are in millimeters).

advantage of using microstrip patch antennas. It is also important to employ material layers with practical permittivity and
permeability values without making the antenna susceptible to
surface wave excitation.
In this paper, we present a new and simple method of increasing the gain of a conventional microstrip patch antenna.
This technique relies on a rectangular loop shaped parasitic radiator which is suspended on top of the antenna. The thickness
of the air gap, which is sandwiched between the fed patch and
the parasitic radiator, is carefully adjusted to obtain the best gain
performance at the operating frequency of 1.6 GHz. Both the
theoretical and experimental results show that the gain of the
conventional antenna is increased from about 4.5 dB to 7.8 dB
by employing this technique. While the thickness of air layer of
30 mm provides the greatest gain improvement, a thickness of

1536-1225/$25.00 2008 IEEE

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 7, 2008

Fig. 4. 1Improvement in antenna gain as a function of the air gap thickness, h.

TABLE I
DATA FOR THE GAIN MEASUREMENTS

Fig. 3. (a) Measured and (b) simulated return losses with and without the parasitic ring.

10 mm still provides an improvement of about 2.2 dB. Therefore

there is a compromise between the improvement in gain and the
additional bulk introduced by our technique.
II. ANTENNA ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
Cross-sectional and top views of the microstrip patch antenna
with a rectangular loop shaped parasitic radiator are shown in
Figs. 1 and 2. A foam like material whose permittivity is very
close to that of air is used to provide the required mechanical
support for the parasitic radiator, while it remains reasonably
invisible to the electromagnetic fields. For the simulations, the
antenna was built on a 1.6 mm
thick FR4 substrate with
a relative permittivity of 4.4 and a loss tangent of 0.02. The
side length of the squared patch
is designed to be half of
the wavelength at the operating frequency of
GHz,
, where is the speed of light in free
i.e.,
space, is the effective dielectric constant in FR4 material, and
is a numerically obtained coefficient which accounts
for the fringing field effects [6]. The other dimensions are shown
in Figs. 1 and 2.
A microstrip transmission line with a 50
characteristic
impedance was 3 mm
wide for the given substrate parameters. Given that the input impedance presented by the antenna
is much larger than 50 , a microstrip transformer of 1 mm
width
was used between the input of the antenna and
50 microstrip for better matching and improved return loss.

The thickness of the air gap

on top of which the parasitic
radiator stands was optimized to satisfy the resonant condition
for best gain performance. The resonance condition in this
structure is a function of the combined effects of and , as
well as the geometry of the parasitic radiator [7]. The results
are given and discussed in the following section.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The return losses of the antenna as a function of frequency
with and without the parasitic ring were theoretically calculated and experimentally measured. Fig. 3(a) and (b) shows
the results from measurements and simulations, respectively,
with very good agreement between them. Simulations were
performed by the Ansoft HFSS_v11 full-wave analysis tool
[8], and measurements were conducted using a vector network
analyzer. Introduction of the parasitic ring causes the resonance
frequency to increase slightly which can be attributed to the
resonant cavity effect.
Before characterizing the radiation patterns of the antenna in
different planes with respect to , the elevation angle measured
from z-axis, the improvement in gain (along z-axis,
) as
has been investigated.
a function of the air gap thickness,
To this end, a ridge antenna was used as a transmitting reference gain antenna in the anechoic chamber. The received power
was then recorded for three cases: 1) ridge/ridge, 2) ridge/patch
without parasitic, and 3) ridge/patch with parasitic. The gain of
the ridge antenna is 11 dB at 1.6 GHz. From the measured received power levels for the three configurations, the gains of
the patch antenna with and without parasitic corresponding to
different air gap thicknesses have been determined. The table
below shows the data for
mm. Fig. 4 shows the gain
improvement as a function of (Table I).

YILDIRIM AND CETINER: ENHANCED GAIN PATCH ANTENNA WITH A RECTANGULAR LOOP SHAPED PARASITIC RADIATOR

Fig. 5. Measured and simulated radiation patterns in x-z plane at 1.6 GHz
(a) with and (b) without parasitic ring.

As is seen in Fig. 4, the measured maximum gain increases

as is increased from 10 mm, whereas
mm provided
the best improvement. Further increase in degrades the gain.
While
mm provides the greatest gain improvement of
3.3 dB, a thickness of 10 mm still provides an improvement
of about 2.2 dB. Therefore there is a compromise between the
improvement in gain and the additional bulk introduced by our
technique.
After determining the thickness of the air gap,
mm,
which provided the maximum gain enhancement, the radiation
patterns of the antenna at 1.6 GHz were taken in the principal
cuts, i.e., - and -planes, which correspond to
and
planes, respectively. Both co- and crosspolar components were measured and simulated. The agreement

231

Fig. 6. Measured and simulated radiation patterns in y-z plane at 1.6 GHz
(a) with and (b) without parasitic ring.

between simulations and measurements was very good except in

the regions where the SMA connector plays a shadowing effect.
The co- and cross-polarization components of the antenna in
the -plane, i.e.,
plane, with and without the parasitic radiator are shown in Fig. 5(a) and (b), respectively. In the -plane,
the co-and cross-polarization components correspond to and
components of the electric field, respectively. In these plots, all
component values were normalized with respect to the same reference, which was so chosen to make the maximum value 0 dB.
The improvement in the co-polarization component, which corresponds to 3.3 dB enhancement in gain, is clearly observed
by comparing Fig. 5(a) with Fig. 5(b). Radiation patterns in
-plane were shown in Fig. 6(a) and (b). As for the -plane, the

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 7, 2008

improvement in co-polarization component, which corresponds

to the component of the electric field, is clearly observed.
IV. CONCLUSION
A new and simple technique of improving the gain of a
microstrip-fed patch antenna is presented in this paper. This
technique relies on a loop shaped parasitic radiator strategically
placed on top of the patch antenna. It has been demonstrated
that the gain of a conventional microstrip patch antenna can be
increased from 4.57.8 dB corresponding to 3.3 dB enhancement in gain. The impedance and radiation performances of the
proposed antenna were theoretically and experimentally studied
showing a good agreement between theoretical and measured
results. Given the simplicity of the technique presented in this
paper, this technique can be easily combined with other gain
enhancement methods to provide even higher improvement in
gain, which can be very useful for applications requiring higher
gain values.

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