Directional Monopole Antenna Using a Planar Lossy Magnetic (PLM) Surface

Abstract

A directional monopole antenna using a planar lossy magnetic (PLM) surface is proposed in this paper. When a monopole antenna is designed vertically on the ground plane composed of a perfect electric conductor (PEC) and a perfect magnetic conductor (PMC), the surface current on the ground plane cannot flow on the PMC and only flows in one direction on the PEC. Therefore, the electromagnetic (EM) wave of such a monopole antenna can radiate in the direction perpendicular to the ground. Alternatively, a PLM surface such as a ferrite sheet with a high relative permeability was employed to achieve EM properties similar to the PMC. To verify the feasibility of the proposed antenna, a ferrite sheet with a relative permeability of 20 and a magnetic loss tangent of 10 at 2 GHz was utilized to implement the half PMC ground plane, and the monopole antenna was bent for miniaturization. The measured peak gain and the -10 dB bandwidth was about 1.3 dBi and 23% at the resonant frequency, respectively.