A Hexagonal Broadband Compact Microstrip Monopole Antenna for C Band, X Band and Ku Band Applications

This paper is aimed at developing a Hexagonal Patch Microstrip antenna for C Band, X Band and Ku Band Applications. This is designed using FR-4 (Lossy) substrate and validation of model is done using extensive simulations in CST MWS 2011. The proposed design is achieved using 3 steps with each step resulting in a great enhancement in the bandwidth. The proposed antenna works for all frequencies from 3.68 - 18.297 GHz resulting in a huge bandwidth of 14.617 GHz. Bandwidth enhancement of 504 percent is observed in the proposed antenna as compared to a simple patch antenna, the details of which is provided in Step 1. The proposed antenna provides this huge bandwidth with a minimal size of 15x20 mm(2). The results are evident that the proposed antenna can be used for all C Band (4-8 GHz), X Band (8-12 GHz) and Ku Band (12-18 GHz) applications including Radar and Satellite Communications and Weather Monitoring.