Design of a Wideband Printed Patch Dipole Antenna with a Balanced On-Board Feeding Network

This paper proposes a wideband printed patch dipole antenna with a simple on-board feeding network. The proposed antenna is composed of two dipole radiators, a transmission line, and an on-board feeding network with a chip balun. The dipole radiators are printed on a substrate, and the edges of the radiators are truncated to create a hexagonal shape with wide impedance-matching characteristics. The chip balun is embedded in an RO4003C printed circuit board (PCB) to excite differential feeding to each radiator with a 180 degrees phase difference. The proposed antenna is optimized using a CST Studio full electromagnetic software tool, and it is fabricated and measured in an anechoic chamber. The measured fractional bandwidth for the reflection coefficient below -10 dB is 79.5%, and the proposed antenna has a measured gain of 7.1 dBi at 3.5 GHz.