Design of Multiband, Reconfigurable Coplanar Meander Antenna for WLAN Applications

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation of Reconfigurable, Planar Meander Antenna operates at 2.45 GHz and 5.12 GHz for WLAN applications. In the proposed work the planar meander antenna is designed using FR4 substrate. In the meander antenna the varactor diodes are incorporated in the appropriate arm positions to achieve reconfigurability. In this, reconfigurability is accomplished using frequency tuning. Also, the principle of reconfigurability in meander antenna focuses size reduction and dual band operations. The meander structure is characterized for its operating frequency. A parametric study is done for finding the resonance in the appropriate arm positions of the meander antenna. The varactor diodes fixed meander antenna is tested using network analyzer. The comparison is made for the antenna designs of with and without varactor diodes for the establishment of reconfigurability. The effects of active components are ignored. The proposed antenna design is validated for its concurrence in both simulation and experimentation. The arm and the behavior of the frequency tuning is tested using the network analyzer. The reflection coefficient is -23.66dB and -18.41dB at 2.45 GHz and 5.1 GHz respectively. The overall size of the meander antenna is reduced by 76%. VSWR of the proposed antenna is 1.