Microstrip & Printed Antenna Design

Microstrip and printed antennas have a large number of aerospace applications despite their limitations. They are also used in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) to provide short range high-speed data connections between mobile devices and wireless access points. Today a farrago of designs have been developed which can be bewildering for designers who are new to the subject. This book attempts to explain the basic concepts, focusing on presenting several useful, practical, simple, and manufacturable antenna designs which have considerable utility. It also contains references useful to designers who wish to research other more complex microstrip antenna designs which are not presented in this volume. The book also introduces the readers to computer methods of analysis, in particular the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method, which can be implemented to estimate design dimensions. Results from such methods are presented to provide insights into a design. Written in an accessible style, this succinct treatment on creating microstrip antennas should be useful to all those practising engineers who wish to gain a fundamental understanding of microstrip and printed antenna geometries and their limitations. The increasing applications of microstrip antennas demand that students of electronics and communi-cation engineering should also understand these fundamental principles. This book can serve as a useful reference for students during the study of planar transmission lines for the course in microwave engineering.