A Compact Multiband Printed Dipole Antenna Loaded With Two Unequal Parallel NRI-TL Metamaterial Unit Cells

A negative-refractive-index transmission-line (NRI-TL) metamaterial-loaded dipole antenna is proposed, which has a fully printed configuration and exhibits multiband performance. The antenna consists of a conventional dipole antenna loaded with two unequal parallel NRI-TL metamaterial unit cells which have the same electrical length, but each is loaded with a thin inductive strip that has a different length and therefore a different effective shunt inductance. An equivalent circuit is extracted to investigate the performance of the proposed metamaterial-loaded dipole antenna by modeling each of the dipole arms as a transmission line. This circuit is then used to verify that the resonant behavior of the proposed antenna can be altered by simply adjusting the lengths of the thin inductive strips. A fabricated prototype has compact dimensions of 40 mm x 10 mm x 1.6 mm, and exhibits good agreement between the measured and simulated results.