IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

8, 2009

299

An Improved Band-Rejection UWB Antenna With

Resonant Patches and a Slot
Joon-Won Jang and Hee-Yong Hwang, Member, IEEE

AbstractUsing two parasitic patches and a parasitic slot, we

achieved a circular-slot type ultrawideband (UWB) antenna with
excellent band-rejection characteristics. By changing the parameters of the parasitic patches and slot on the radiator, not only the rejection frequency but also the skirt and bandwidth of the 5-GHz rejection band can be easily modified without the degradation of the
UWB antenna characteristics itself. Optimized parasitic patches
and slot give the conventional circular-slot UWB antenna sufficient
rejection bandwidth and sharp skirt response in 5-GHz rejection
band.
Index TermsBand-rejection antenna, circular-slot antenna,
resonant patches, resonant slot, ultrawideband (UWB) antenna.

Fig. 1. Signal transmission characteristic of (a) conventional band-rejection

UWB antenna and (b) improved band-rejection UWB antenna [9].

I. INTRODUCTION

N RECENT applications of ultrawideband (UWB) frequency band from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz for telecommunication,
remote sensing, radar, location tracing, etc., the exploitation of UWB antenna is steadily growing [1]. However,
over the designated UWB frequency band, there are wireless local area network (WLAN) operating bands such as
the 5.1505.825-GHz bands, which may cause interference
with UWB operations. Hence, a filter that rejects the limited
bandwidth (5.1505.825 GHz) should be necessary in UWB
RF front-ends, and this will give complication, large size, and
insertion-loss problem to UWB systems.
To overcome this problem, various UWB antennas with a
notch function have been developed [1][9]. Some techniques
have been proposed to achieve notched band using a parasitic
thin slot in a patch antenna [3][6] and using parasitic patches
[7], [8]. However, these techniques provide unsatisfactory skirt
characteristics and cannot provide a sufficient rejection bandwidth to utilize the antenna practically, as illustrated in Fig. 1(a).
In order to solve this problem, a sophisticated study [1] about
embedding two horizontal resonant slots and adjusting the mutual coupling values between them was tried, but it also does
not have enough band-reject characteristics because of effective
area limitation of the radiator for obtaining sufficient coupling
value.
In this letter, we present a more practical and effective
method, the use of resonant parasitic patches and slot, for
obtaining very sharp, fully wide, and deep band-rejection
characteristics as in Fig. 1(b).
Manuscript received October 14, 2008; revised November 19, 2008 and January 08, 2009. First published February 18, 2009; current version published May
13, 2009.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Kangwon National University, Kangwon-Do 200-701, South Korea
(e-mail: hyhwang@kangwon.ac.kr).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2009.2015344

Fig. 2. Structure of the proposed antenna: (a) front view and (b) rear view.

II. BAND-REJECTION ANTENNA DESIGN

The conventional circular-slot UWB antenna [10][12] has
a circular patch and an elliptical slot that are asymmetrically
positioned for UWB antenna operation. A tapered feed-line for
impedance matching is printed on the opposite side of the elliptical slot.
The structural parameters are optimized using a three-dimensional (3-D) EM-simulator, HFSS. The supposed
mm,
antenna substrate is Rogers RF-60A (
).
The proposed antenna has a slot and two patches in addition
to the conventional antenna, as shown in Fig. 2
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
). Considering a tradeoff between the
impedance variation throughout the UWB and the whole antenna size, we chose the antenna size as 49 53 in
millimeters.
According to the simulated surface current and field distribution of the conventional antenna at frequency 5.5 GHz, the
surface current goes in the direction of the z-axis on the circular
patch and the E-field distribute in the adjoining slot of the circular patch [13]. Therefore, the orientations of the parasitic slot
and patches of the proposed antenna in Fig. 2 give rise to the

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 8, 2009

Fig. 3. Surface current distribution of the proposed antenna at 5.5 GHz, which
is in rejection band. Both surface currents of front and rear sides are overlapped.

Fig. 4. Simulated return loss comparison of band-rejection antennas with a parasitic patch, a parasitic slot, and parasitic slot and patch.

destructive interference for the surface current and the E-field

distributions, respectively, which causes the antenna to be nonresponsive at that frequency. The surface current distribution of
the proposed antenna at 5.5 GHz is depicted in Fig. 3. We can see
that the current directions on the parasitic patch and along the
adjoining slot edge are opposite and destructively interfere with
each other. Meanwhile, the excited surface current on the circular patch is disturbed by the parasitic slot, which also causes
the band-rejection characteristics.
Fig. 4 illustrates the return loss comparison of band-rejection
antennas with a parasitic patch, a parasitic slot, and parasitic slot
and patch. The best band-rejection characteristics in skirt, depth,
and bandwidth are achieved by the proposed antenna, which is
the antenna with parasitic slot and patch.
The band-rejection characteristics of the proposed antenna
, widths
, and
can be controlled by the lengths
angle
of the parasitic slot and/or patches (see Fig. 2). The
parasitic patchs starting position from the z-axis, , and the
parasitic slots distance from the bottom of the ring patch, H,
are fixed during optimization of the other parameters. As shown
in Fig. 5(a), the band-rejection frequency can be changed by the
of the parasitic patches and slot with fixed other
lengths
parameters. The rejection frequency decreases as the lengths
increase. Also, Fig. 5(b) and (c) show that the rejection bandwidths are increased according to the increases of the widths
or the angle
, respectively.

Fig. 5. The simulated band-rejection characteristics according to (a) the increase of the lengths (l ; l );, (b) the increase of the widths (W ; W ), and
(c) the increase of the angles ( ) of the parasitic slot and/or patches in Fig. 2.

Photographs of the proposed antenna are shown in Fig. 6. The

simulated and the measured return losses of the proposed antenna and the measured return loss of the conventional antenna
are compared in Fig. 7. In the measured data for the proposed
antenna, 5.056.17 GHz is the rejection band in which the return loss is less than 10 dB. The excellent rejection shape in
5-GHz band is accomplished by inserting two parasitic patches
and a parasitic slot, without any degradation of the performance
in the normal operating frequency band.
The measured VSWR of the proposed antenna is compared to
that of [6] in Fig. 8. We can see that the proposed antenna is superior to [6] in skirt, bandwidth, and depth of the band rejection.
It is clear that the proposed antenna provides the improved and

JANG AND HWANG: IMPROVED BAND-REJECTION UWB ANTENNA

301

Fig. 8. Measured VSWR comparison of [6] and proposed antenna.

Fig. 9. Measured group delay for proposed antenna.

Fig. 6. Photograph of the fabricated proposed antenna: (a) front view and
(b) rear view.

Fig. 7. Comparison of simulated and measured return losses of the proposed

antenna and measured return loss of the conventional antenna.

sufficient rejection bandwidth and sharp skirt response, compared to the conventional band-rejection antennas.

Fig. 9 shows the measured result for the group delay; a

double-ridged horn antenna (MTG-drh-020180) was used as
a reference antenna for transmitting. The distance between
the reference antenna and the proposed antenna was 7 m, and
the measurement was performed in a10 5 5 (m ) anechoic
chamber with an Anritsu 37397C network analyzer. These
plots are screen-captured directly from the network analyzer.
Except for the rejection band, the available range of UWB
communication, the group delay variation is less than 1 ns.
Fig. 10 shows the measured radiation patterns of the proposed
antenna and the conventional antenna on the x-y plane. The radiation patterns show variations within about 6 dB from each
average gain by directions, as in [10] and [12]. In the radiation
bands (3.5 and 9 GHz), the proposed antenna and conventional
antenna have nearly the same gain as in other reference papers
[1][9], which means the adding of parasitic slot and/or parasitic
patch nearly do not degrade the radiation gain of the antenna
pass-bands. In addition, the gain variations by direction and frequency are within 4 dB. Within the rejection band (5.3 GHz),
however, the antenna radiation gain reduced due to the parasitic
patches and parasitic slot resonator approximately 1020 dB according to the radiation directions.

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 8, 2009

Fig. 10. Measured radiation patterns for conventional antenna and proposed antenna (x-y plane).

III. CONCLUSION
Two parasitic patches and a parasitic slot are used to achieve
a circular-slot type UWB antenna with excellent band-rejection
characteristics. The measured result shows excellent 5-GHz rejection-band characteristics, deep rejection, very sharp skirt, and
sufficient rejection bandwidth, with good radiation characteristics in UWB operating band. The measured group delay of less
than 1 ns makes it possible to communicate without the signal
distortion in UWB applications. This technology, which uses
both parasitic patch and parasitic slot, simultaneously, could be
useful for designing various antennas that have a rejection band.
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