SNR Enhancement of an Electrically Small Antenna Using a Non-Foster Matching Circuit

Abstract

A non-Foster circuit (NFC) is known as an active broadband matching technique to improve the impedance matching bandwidth of an electrically small antenna (ESA). There has been a vast amount of papers that report the generation of negative impedance using an NFC and its effectiveness on broadband antenna matching. However, only a few discussed its impact on the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), which is one of the most important figures-of-merit for a wireless communication system. In this paper, the SNR enhancement due to an NFC was measured and discussed. An NFC was carefully designed to have a low dissipation loss and to meet the stability conditions. The optimized NFC design was fabricated and applied to an ESA length of λ⁄15 at a frequency range of 150 to 300 MHz. The measured results showed that the NFC enhanced the received power of the antenna system by more than 17 dB. However, due to the noise added by the NFC, the SNR enhancement was not guaranteed for some frequency points. Nevertheless, an average of 7.3 dB of SNR improvement over the frequency band of interest is possible based on the experiment result.