Multiband Microstrip Antenna Using Square-shaped SRR Based Artificial Magnetic Conductors

This paper presents the investigation of multiband microstrip antenna using structure of artificial magnetic conductors (AMC) based on square-shaped split ring resonator (SRR). The proposed antenna is intended to operate at a number of frequency bands frequently used for wireless communications application. The AMC structure made of 2 × 2 square-shaped SRR array on a grounded dielectric substrate is applied to replace the groundplane of conventional microstrip antenna yielding the appearance of other resonant frequencies. Two layers of 1.6 mm thick FR4 epoxy dielectric substrate with the dimension of 52 mm × 52 mm are used to implement the proposed antenna. To demonstrate the potentiality of AMC structure in contributing multiband frequency responses, a conventional microstrip antenna made of the same dielectric substrate with the same physical parameters is also investigated. The characterization result shows that the proposed antenna has the resonant frequencies of 1.575 GHz, 1.85 GHz, and 2.4 GHz suitable for Global Positioning System (GPS), Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) applications, respectively.