A printed dual-wideband magneto-electric dipole antenna for WWAN/LTE applications

A planar-printed dual-wideband U-shaped magneto-electric dipole omnidirectional antenna with a composite feeding structure for WWAN/LTE applications is proposed. Firstly, a U-shaped electric dipole structure is presented to provide a dual-wideband by changing the surface-current distributions. In addition, in order to reduce antenna size and improve impedance matching, a new feeding structure designed with inverted U-shaped tapered line and meandering T-shaped line is introduced. Finally, instead of a conventional vertical ground plane, a small-size one is printed on the reverse side of the substrate to achieve stable gains and omnidirectional radiation patterns. The antenna prototype can attain a bandwidth of 35.8% (0.78-1.12 GHz) with a stable gain of 3 ± 0.5 dBi for the lower band, and a bandwidth of 50.5% (1.66-2.78 GHz) with a gain of 3.8 ± 0.6 dBi for the upper band, covering the frequency bands granted for WWAN/LTE systems. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first real-sense planar magneto-electric dipole antenna proposed. In comparison with the existing ME dipole antennas, the proposed antenna, which is planar-printed on a small-size FR4 substrate with a simple structure, can be easily fabricated at low cost and thus is promising for WWAN/LTE communication.