200 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

8, 2009

Design of a Multiband Antenna

for Mobile Handset Operations
Hsuan-Wei Hsieh, Yi-Chieh Lee, Kwong-Kau Tiong, and Jwo-Shiun Sun

Abstract—A compact internal antenna is proposed for

GSM/GPS/DCS/PCS/UMTS/Bluetooth/WLAN/WiFi/WiMAX ap-
plications. The proposed antenna is comprised of a loop antenna
and a monopole antenna. The antenna system shows wide
multi-operation band as well as good radiation patterns and small
volume. The antenna can be printed on the system circuit board
of the mobile phone and short-circuited to the system ground
plane to form a loop-type structure. A comparison with that of
the existing antennas showed that wide impedance bandwidth of
the proposed structure can be achieved without increasing the
implementation complexity.
Index Terms—Handset antenna, internal antennas, loop an-
tenna, monopole, multiband, printed antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION

Fig. 1. Geometry of the proposed antenna. (a) Configuration of the proposed

M ODERN mobile handsets are often required to operate
at multiple frequency bands to facilitate the applica-
tion for various communication needs [1]–[3]. Furthermore, the
antenna. (b) The dimensions of the proposed antenna (units: millimeters).

requirements for the mobile stations to be compact and light-

weight are also demanded [4]. In view of these emerging trends
in mobile communication, novel antenna designs are needed.
Various techniques have been utilized in the design to satisfy
multiband requirement [3]. It has been demonstrated that a loop
antenna can be promising for achieving dual-band or multiband
operations in the mobile phone [5], [6]. Multiple resonances in
the antenna structure can be excited by using a monopole to
cover a single band or a branch structure of two monopoles to
cover the lower band centered at 910 MHz or the higher bands
centered at 1700 MHz. Size reduction is usually achieved by
using shorting pins, stubs, and folding or meandering of the res-
onators in an appropriate form. Various interesting multiband
planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA)-based designs are reported in
the literature [4], [7].
In this letter, we propose a novel multiband internal
antenna based on a combination of a loop-type an-
tenna and a shorted monopole for GSM (880–960 MHz),
DCS (1710–1880 MHz), PCS (1850–1990 MHz), UMTS
(1920–2170 MHz), ISM/Bluetooth (2400–2480 MHz),
WLAN (2400–2483/5100–5900 MHz) and WiMAX
Manuscript received September 25, 2008; revised October 31, 2008. First
published December 31, 2008; current version published April 29, 2009.
H.-W. Hsieh and K.-K. Tiong are with the Department of Electrical En-
gineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung 202, Taiwan (e-mail:
M96530076@ntou.edu.tw).
Y.-C. Lee and J.-S. Sun are with the Graduate Institute of Computer and Com-
munication Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 106,
Taiwan.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2008.2011655
1536-1225/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE
(2500–2690/3400–3600 MHz) frequency bands. The pro-
posed antenna with a simple structure can be implemented
easily and provides improved impedance bandwidths for prac-
tical application.
II. DESIGN CONSIDERATION
The proposed antenna is depicted in Fig. 1. The antenna pat-
tern of total area mm mm is printed on a 1.6-mm-thick
FR4 substrate of size mm mm. The detail dimen-
sions of the antenna pattern are as shown in Fig. 1(b). The FR4
substrate has a relative permittivity of 4.4 and a loss tangent
of 0.0245. The sizes of the system ground plane and circuit
board are selected for possible application of the proposed an-
tenna for a general PDA phone or smart phone. The resonant
element of the lower band is a spiral monopole, while both
the monopole and loop antennas can generate radiation at a
higher band. The bandwidths generated by the individual res-
onant structure are not wide enough to cover the entire band for
GPS/PCS/UMTS operations. However, it is found that the loop-
type antenna can couple with the spiral monopole antenna to im-
prove the impedance bandwidths dramatically. The coupling ef-
fect results in the shift of third resonant mode or 1.5-wavelength
mode of the monopole toward the second resonant mode to form
a very wide operating band covering a complete range for DCS/
PCS/UMTS operations. The bottom of the spiral monopole is
forming a slot with the ground plane and is responsible for ex-
citing the mode at resonance of the loop antenna at about
6 GHz.
HSIEH et al.: MULTIBAND ANTENNA FOR MOBILE HANDSET OPERATIONS
Fig. 2. Measured and simulated return loss of the proposed antenna.
Fig. 3. Measured return loss for (a) monopole antenna, (b) loop antenna, and (c) the proposed antenna.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Fig. 2 shows the measured and simulated return loss for
the fabricated prototype antenna. The characteristics of the
proposed antenna have been simulated with the use of Ansoft
HFSS software, which is based on the finite-element method.
Electrical characteristics such as return loss of the imple-
mented antenna were measured by E8362B vector network
analyzer. The simulated results agreed well with the mea-
sured ones. Impedance bandwidths (VSWR 3) are 89 MHz
(9.64%), spanning the entire range from 877 to 966 MHz
for the lower band; 2422 MHz (100.16%), which covers the
frequency range from 1210 to 3632 MHz for the middle band;
and 2581 MHz (43.15%), covering the frequency range from
4688 to 7269 MHz for the higher band. Measured impedance
bandwidth essentially covers the entire range for multiband
201
operations of GSM/DCS/PCS/UMTS/WLAN/WiMAX. Fig. 3
shows the measured return loss for the monopole antenna, loop
antenna, and the proposed antenna. For the case of monopole
antenna, four resonant modes at about 1000, 1700, 2400, and
5200 MHz are excited. The loop antenna generated higher
band at about 6500 MHz. Fig. 4 shows the measured radiation
patterns in the x-z plane, x-y plane, and y-z plane that include
copolarization (Co-pol) and cross-polarization (X-pol) for the
proposed antenna at 910, 1700, 2400, 3500, and 5700 MHz.
The definition for Co-pol and X-pol followed that of [7]. The
reference direction is along the direction of maximum current
in the radiating structure so that Co-pol will result in a stronger
radiation pattern. The obtained radiation patterns are near
omnidirectional in x-z plane, and the radiation patterns exhibit
monopole-like patterns in the y-z plane. The measured peak
gain of the proposed antenna in the frequency range of 0.5 to
6 GHz is depicted in Fig. 5.
202 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 8, 2009

Fig. 4. Measured radiation patterns at (a) 910, (b) 1700, (c) 2400, (d) 3500, and (e) 5700 MHz for the antenna.

Fig. 5. Results of the proposed antenna peak gain.

HSIEH et al.: MULTIBAND ANTENNA FOR MOBILE HANDSET OPERATIONS
IV. CONCLUSION
We have designed and implemented a compact multiband in-
ternal antenna by combining a monopole and a loop antenna.
The proposed antenna generates resonant modes covering the
multi-operation bands for GSM/DCS/PCS/UMTS/WLAN and
WiMAX operations. In spite of very small volume, good radia-
tion patterns as well as wide bandwidth characteristics over the
entire operation bands have been demonstrated.
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