Effects of Different Substrates on Staircase Shaped Microstrip Patch Antenna for KU Band

Different dielectric substrates can be used to fabricate microstrip patch antenna. So we need to select the substrate which gives better performance. In this paper, the performance of staircase shaped microstrip patch antenna is analyzed for 4 different substrates. The antenna is designed to operate in KU band (12-18GHz). The design frequency is taken as 15GHz and the height of all 4 dielectric substrates is kept constant at 1.6mm. The patch is designed using Zeland IE3D simulator. Comparison is done for antenna parameters such as Return Loss, VSWR, Gain, Directivity, Bandwidth, Radiation Efficiency and Antenna Efficiency. Co-axial probe feeding technique is used. RT Duroid gives the best performance with Return Loss of -23.46dB, Directivity of 8.38dBi, Gain of 4.85dBi and Bandwidth of 1.82GHz.