Octave bandwidth printed bow-tie fed partial cavity slot antenna

A partial cavity backed wide bandwidth slot antenna fed with a bow-tie feed line is proposed as a viable element for mobile communication base station applications. A novel feeding mechanism consisting of a printed bow-tie feed placed within the slot aperture and metal baffles between the slot ground plane and a grounded backplane allow this antenna to operate over more than an octave bandwidth (1.15 to 2.46GHz) with a VSWR <2. Measured radiation patterns are presented for the frequency range of 1.7-2.2GHz, selected to give total coverage over the entire PCN and UMTS frequency bands. The gain of the antenna was found to be 5.4dBi at 1.7GHz and 4.6dBi at 2.2GHz. In addition to its bandwidth, a special feature of the slot antenna design is the small slot ground plane (1(0) x 1 lambda (0)) and small background plane (2 lambda (0) x 2 lambda (0)) needed for consistent pattern formation over the entire frequency range of interest.