Date of Award Master of Science (MS) Electrical and Computer
Engineering James E. Richie Microstrip antennas are a type of
printed antenna which consists of a patch on top of a grounded
substrate. A major limitation for the performance of the patch
antenna is the dielectric substrate. The idea of using air as
dielectric was therefore considered to overcome that limitation
because air has the lowest permittivity and no loss. The goal of
this work is to build an air-spaced patch antenna, with the
minimum resonant frequency at 1800 MHz and with a return loss of
at least 10 dB. This work is novel because the air-spaced patch
antenna has not been extensively studied. Existing literature on
patch antennas with dielectric were used for the design of the
antenna (dimensions of the patch, ground plane and height) and
to understand the principles of operation of microstrip patch
antennas in general. Simulations using the NEC code and
experiments in the RF laboratory were used for this air-spaced
patch antenna study. Th