A broad-band rectangular patch antenna with a pair of wide slits

A new broad-band design of a probe-fed rectangular patch antenna with a pair of wide slits is proposed and experimentally studied. The proposed design is with an air substrate, and experimental results show that, simply by inserting a pair of wide slits at one of the radiating edges of the rectangular patch, good impedance matching over a wide bandwidth can easily be achieved for the proposed antenna. With an air substrate of thickness about 8% of the wavelength of the center operating frequency, the proposed antenna can have an impedance bandwidth of about 24%. For frequencies within the impedance bandwidth, good radiation characteristics are also observed, with a peak antenna gain of about 7.2 dBi.