A New Weighting Method for Antenna Clusters

This paper presents a new weighting method that can be used for designing antenna clusters. The proposed weighting method performs a compromise, which provides a moderate and practical way of taking into account both the scattering parameters of the antenna cluster and the efficiencies of the individual antenna elements. Meanwhile, it does not require the detailed information nor the volume integral of far-field radiation patterns at each frequency point. In order to validate the proposed weighting method, an antenna cluster consisting of four inverted-F antenna (IFA) elements for mobile handset devices operating at 700–960 MHz is designed. The total active reflection coefficient (TARC) and the total efficiency of the antenna cluster are compared with the existing methods.