5580 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO.
10, OCTOBER 2018
Communication
A Novel Tri-Band Patch Antenna With Broadside Radiation
and Its Application to Filtering Antenna
Jian-Feng Qian, Fu-Chang Chen , and Qing-Xin Chu
Abstract— A tri-band patch antenna utilizing the TM10 mode together
with modified TM20 and TM30 modes of a single patch is proposed
in this communication. Through asymmetrically loading a stub on one
radiating edge of the patch and cutting a rectangular slot offset from the
other one, the current distributions of the TM20 and TM30 modes are
perturbed, resulting in broadside radiation for all the first three modes of
a single patch. Each operational frequency can be effectively controlled
through varying the dimensions of the patch, slot, and loading stub.
Good impedance matching is achieved simultaneously in three operational
bands through aperture coupling. A prototype is designed, fabricated,
and measured for validation. Based on this tri-band antenna, a new tri-
band filtering antenna is further developed, showing good selectivity and
broadside radiation characteristic.
Index Terms— Broadside radiation, filtering antenna, patch antenna,
tri-band antenna.
I. I NTRODUCTION
With the development of various wireless communication stan-
dards, antennas with multiple operational frequencies are attractive
solutions for system meeting multiple standards. For a multiband
antenna, similar radiation characteristics (gain and radiation pattern)
are generally useful for each band.
Considerable interest has been seen in the literature in the design of
patch antennas with multifrequency operation [1]–[18]. One common
design method is utilizing multiple radiators with different dimen-
sions, for example, multiple stacked patches [3], [4] or closely placed
coplanar patches [5], [6]. Utilizing orthogonal modes of a single
patch is believed to be another effective choice for multiband antenna
design [7], [8]. This approach is quite simple and effective to obtain
two operational bands with good radiation performance for both
bands. However, to date, this has always suffered from a limited
frequency ratio and poor radiation efficiency.
For a microstrip patch antenna, the TM20 mode has a radiation null,
whereas the TM30 mode has three multiple lobes in the broadside
direction. These two modes are widely used for multiband antenna
designs. The reactive loading technique is the most popular method
in these dual-band patch antenna designs [9]–[11]. The current
distribution of the TM30 mode is modified on the patch by loading
elements, so that the typical three-lobe radiation pattern of the
unperturbed TM30 mode can be eliminated with a little influence on
the TM10 mode. Two narrow slots are cut offset from the radiating
Manuscript received November 19, 2017; revised June 7, 2018; accepted
June 24, 2018. Date of publication July 5, 2018; date of current version
October 4, 2018. This work was supported in part by the Guangdong Provin-
cial Key Laboratory of Short-Range Wireless Detection and Communication
under Grant 2017B030314003, in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant 61571194, and in part by the Project of the
Pearl River Young Talents of Science and Technology in Guangzhou under
Grant 201610010095. (Corresponding author: Fu-Chang Chen.)
The authors are with the School of Electronic and Information Engineering,
South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China (e-mail:
chenfuchang@scut.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are
available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2018.2853160
0018-926X © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
edges of a patch for dual-band design in [9]. The current path
of the unperturbed TM30 mode is lengthened by the slots, and a
TM10 -like radiation pattern can thus be observed as long as the slots
are long enough. The current distribution of the TM30 mode can also
be changed for broadside radiation by loading stubs [10] or pins [11].
Metamaterial loading is widely used to modify the TM20 mode of
a patch antenna for dual-band operation [12]–[14]. The frequency
range can be tuned by properly designing the dimensions of the patch
and the metamaterial filling ratio. All these metamaterial loading
techniques, however, are difficult to manufacture and are costly.
Etching U-shaped slots on the radiating patch is also widely
used for multiband operation [15], [16]. The equivalent inductance
introduced by the feed structure, such as probe feed [15] and
coplanar waveguide feed [16], together with the equivalent capacitor
introduced by the slots, leads to one or more resonances [17]. In [18],
a resonator-coupled multiband patch antenna design is outlined.
By changing the number of resonators and coupling between the
resonators, dual-band and quad-band patch antennas are achieved.
All the designs mentioned above mainly focus on dual-band antennas.
However, to the authors’ knowledge, antennas with tri-band operation
utilizing different modes of a single patch have not been investigated.
In this communication, a tri-band patch antenna with similar
broadside radiation for each band using the fundamental TM10
mode together with modified TM20 and TM30 modes is presented.
Instead of using coplanar elements for loading or other alternatives
using more complex techniques, a very simple method of stub
loading and a slot are used to perturb the field distributions of
the TM20 and TM30 modes for frequency control and broadside
radiation. As modified higher order modes are utilized in the design,
the impedance matching for all the bands can easily be achieved by
a single microstrip feedline, rather than the use of a separate feed for
each of the bands. The detailed operating mechanism is discussed in
this communication, and some parameter studies are conducted for
design guidance. An example tri-band antenna is designed, fabricated,
and measured.
The out-of-band radiation nulls in the gain response make this tri-
band antenna a good candidate for a filtering antenna design. Inspired
by the multimode resonator-coupled tri-band bandpass filter in [24],
a tri-mode resonator is used as feed for the antenna. By integrating
the tri-mode resonator and the tri-band antenna, a tri-band filtering
antenna with improved selectivity is obtained. To verify this design
concept, a tri-band filtering antenna targeting system meeting multiple
standards, such as WLAN and WiMAX applications, is designed,
fabricated, and measured. Both the single tri-band element and the fil-
tering one show good impedance matchings and broadside radiation.
II. T RI -BAND PATCH A NTENNA
A. Basic Structure and Parametric Analysis
Fig. 1 shows the proposed tri-band antenna, which consists of two
dielectric substrates separated by an air gap with a distance of h. The
existence of the air gap not only increases the impedance bandwidth
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2018 5581

Fig. 1. Configuration of the proposed tri-band patch antenna.

of the antenna but also improves the radiation efficiency as outlined

in [19]. An open stub is loaded on one radiating edge of the patch, and
a rectangular slot is positioned offset from the other radiating edge.
The antenna is fed by a 50  microstrip line through an aperture
in the middle common ground plane. All the substrates we used in
this communication have a dielectric constant of 2.55, a loss tangent
of 0.0029, and a thickness of 0.8 mm.
As outlined in [9] and [10], etching slots or loading stubs on a
patch influence the TM30 mode and produce broadside radiation.
When the slot or the stubs are symmetrically located on each side of
the patch, the TM30 mode can be perturbed even as the TM10 mode
remains almost unchanged. This is true except for a small frequency
shift, resulting from a lengthened current path. However, the TM20
mode shows radiation suppression in the broadside direction and is
difficult to match to 50  [9]. Nevertheless, when these two methods
(slot and stub) are used together, from our investigation, the TM20
and TM30 modes can be excited simultaneously with both modes
radiating at the broadside direction.
To illustrate this more clearly, a comparison between the current
distributions of TM20 and TM30 modes under different situations
is shown in Fig. 2. As shown in Fig. 2(a), the original maximum
current density of TM20 at the middle of the patch has moved
to the upper edge of the radiation patch, and the current on the
patch becomes similar to that of the TM10 mode. This is, of course,
only when a stub is attached to the patch. The currents at the two
radiating edges of the patch are in phase, resulting in a broadside
radiation performance [20]. However, for only a stub-loaded patch,
the TM30 mode shows out-of-phase currents at the two radiating
edges, as shown in Fig. 2(b). Consequently, the TM30 mode cannot
radiate in the broadside direction. To solve this problem, a rectangular
slot is cut offset from the other radiating edge of the patch, as shown
in Fig. 2(c) and (d). For this situation, the currents at the two radiating
edges of the TM20 mode are still in phase, as shown in Fig. 2(c).
However, the slot has a strong effect on the TM30 mode as this slot
is cut at the location where the current of the TM30 mode is high
as shown in Fig. 2(d). The loading stub, in conjunction with the cut
slot on the patch, makes the central portion of the current distribution
of the TM30 mode broader than that of an unperturbed one, and a
TM10 -like current distribution is observed [9], [10]. The current
distribution of TM30 mode at the two radiating edges becomes in
phase, as can be seen in Fig. 2(d).
To further understand the antenna, some parametric studies are
carried out using the method of moment-based simulator IE3D [21].
Fig. 3 shows the frequency response of the antenna against dif-
ferent stub lengths (lstub ), slot locations (ls3 ), and slot dimensions
(ls1 , ws1 ). It is found that the stub length has an effect on the
resonant frequencies of the TM10 and TM20 modes, whereas it has
a little influence on the TM30 mode, as shown in Fig. 3(a). The
location of the slot can be used to realize a tuning of the TM30
Fig. 2. Current distributions for each mode of two different patches.
(a) TM20 mode of the patch with only stub loading. (b) TM30 mode of
the patch with only stub loading. (c) TM20 mode of the patch with stub and
slot loading. (d) TM30 mode of the patch with stub and slot loading.
mode without affecting the other two modes, as shown in Fig. 3(b).
Fig. 3(c) and (d) shows the influence of the slot dimensions on the first
three resonances. Changing the dimensions of the slot, such as length
and width, can affect all the three resonances as these changes perturb
the current distributions of all the three resonances. The frequency of
the resonance of the TM20 and TM30 modes moves in the opposite
directions as the slot gets wider. The first three resonant frequencies
of the patch all go down as the slot gets longer, as shown in Fig. 3(d).
It can be seen that the slot length has a more significant influence on
the TM30 mode compared to TM10 and TM20 modes.
All these perturbations give flexibility for frequency tuning. For
instance, one can increase the second resonance independently
through decreasing the width or length of the slot (ws1 ) and then
adjust the location of the slot (ls3 ) to keep the third resonance
unchanged. Because the second and third resonance can be controlled
independently, the first resonance can also be tuned independently
by changing the patch length or stub length. It is noteworthy that
the length of the slot is related to the radiation pattern of the TM30
mode as outlined in [9]. The width of the stub can also be utilized
for frequency tuning [10].
B. Simulation and Measured Results of the Tri-Band Patch Antenna
A 2.5, 3.5, and 5.2 GHz tri-band antenna is designed, fabricated,
and measured according to the above parametric analysis. The
optimized parameters are given in Table I. Fig. 4 shows a photograph
of the fabricated antenna.
5582
Fig. 3. Simulated S11 under different parameters. (a) lstub . (b) ls3 . (c) ws1 .
(d) ls1 .
AHP 5320Avector analyzer is used for the measurement of the
S-parameters of the antenna. Fig. 5 shows the simulated and measured
reflection coefficient and gain of the antenna. The measured −10 dB
reference bandwidths are 2.46–2.53 GHz, 3.47–3.55 GHz, and
5.15–5.29 GHz, with fractional impedance bandwidths of 2.8%,
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2018
TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF THE P ROPOSED T RI -BAND A NTENNA
Fig. 4. Photograph of the fabricated tri-band antenna.
Fig. 5. Simulated and measured reflection coefficient and gain of the
proposed tri-band antenna.
2.3%, and 2.7%, respectively. The measured peak gains of the three
operational bands are 8.02, 7.54, and 6.92 dBi, respectively.
Beside the tri-band operation, two radiation nulls are introduced
between each two bands, as shown in Fig. 5. The locations of the
radiation nulls are related to the lengths of the loading stub and slot.
The first radiation null arises when the stub length is about a quarter
wavelength, effectively shorting this point to the ground with the
quarter-wavelength open-circuit stub. As a result, the patch cannot
radiate efficiently. The frequency of the first radiation null ( fnull−1 )
can be calculated as [22]
c
f null-1 = √ (1)
4 · lstub εeq
where c is the velocity of electromagnetic waves in the free space
and εeq is the equivalent permittivity of the substrate with an air gap,
which can be calculated as [23]
εre (h + h s )
εeq = (2)
h · εre + h s
where h is the height of the air gap and h s denotes the dielectric
substrate thickness. The second radiation null is introduced by the
slot cut on the patch [15]. It is well known that such a shorted
slot is resonant when the total length of the slot is approximately
equal to a half wavelength. When the slot is resonant, the energy is
trapped around the slot and does not radiate. The current distributions
at the frequencies of these two radiation nulls are given in Fig. 6.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2018 5583

Fig. 6. Current distributions at the frequencies of two radiation nulls.

(a) 3.22 GHz. (b) 4.45 GHz.

Significant current at the frequency of the lower null can be observed

on the loading stub. The current on the radiating patch is very
weak, which makes radiation poor. It can be seen that the current
at the two radiation edges of the patch are out of phase; hence, the
radiation from the two edges cancel each other in the far-field, and
a radiation null is produced at this frequency. Similarly, the current
mainly concentrates around the slot and is much weaker in the other
areas of the patch at the frequency of the higher radiation null. Out-
of-phase current distributions can also be observed at two radiating
edges of the patch.
The normalized radiation patterns are shown in Fig. 7. As can
be seen, all the three bands achieve good broadside radiation. Also,
because of the canceling of the antisymmetry current distribution
circulating around the slot, the cross polarizations are suppressed
resulting in low cross-polarization levels, which are all below −30 dB
in the broadside direction. Considering the symmetrical current
distributions around the slot and stub with respect to the yoz plane,
although asymmetrical with respect to the xoz plane, this asym-
metrical structure contributes to a slope away from the idea 0° on
the radiation pattern in the E-plane with a little influence on the
H-plane, especially for TM30 mode as shown in Fig. 7(c). This slope
is acceptable as long as the frequency ratio of the TM20 and TM30
modes is selected properly. The differences between the simulation
and measured results are attributed to the errors of the fabrication
and measurement.
Fig. 7. 2-D radiation patterns of the proposed tri-band antenna. (a) 2.5 GHz.
(b) 3.5 GHz. (c) 5.2 GHz.
III. D ESIGN OF THE T RI -BAND F ILTERING A NTENNA
We can extend the tri-band antenna into a tri-band filtering antenna
by adding extra resonators on the feeding structure. These resonators 5.21–5.45 GHz. In addition, a radiation null is introduced by the
couple to the antenna resonance forming a filter structure. Optimiza- asymmetric parallel-coupled line feeding structure to improve the
tion allows filtering to take place on each of the three bands of the upper stopband rolloff. A radiation null arises at the frequency where
new filtering antenna. the total length (l6 + l7 + w) is about half wavelength [25]. The
The configuration of the tri-band filtering antenna is shown in optimized parameters of the antenna are given in Table II.
Fig. 8. The 50  microstrip feedline is the same as used in the A photograph of the fabricated filtering antenna is given in Fig. 9.
previous antenna in Fig. 1 but has a crossed resonator at the end. The simulated and measured reflection coefficients and boresight
This crossed resonator is discussed in [24]. There is a small via gains are shown in Fig. 10, showing a reasonable agreement between
hole at the end of one of the arms of the crossed resonator. It is the measured and simulation results. The measured impedance band-
shown in Fig. 8 and has a radius of 0.25 mm. By suitably altering widths (|S11 | < −10 dB) are 2.56–2.67 GHz (4.2%), 3.53–3.67 GHz
the dimension of the crossed resonator, its first three resonances (3.9%), and 5.25–5.43 GHz (3.4%). Two reflection zeros can be
can be adjusted to be at the same frequency as those of the tri- observed in each band. The measured peak in-band gains are 7.15,
band patch antenna. The tri-band filtering antenna is designed with 6.02, and 4.38 dBi, and the simulated gains are 7.51, 5.83, and
three operational bands of 2.58–2.68 GHz, 3.50–3.61 GHz, and 5.87 dBi for the three passbands. In Fig. 10, two poles can be seen in
5584 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 66, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2018
Fig. 8. Geometry of the tri-band filtering antenna.
TABLE II
PARAMETERS OF THE P ROPOSED T RI -BAND F ILTERING A NTENNA
Fig. 9. Photograph of the fabricated filtering antenna.
Fig. 10. Simulated and measured reflection coefficient and gain.
each of the return loss passbands confirming the filtering action. In a
conventional design, the insertion loss of a second-order microstrip
filter is about 1.5 dB if the bandwidth is smaller than 6% [5]. This
is why the gain of the tri-band filtering antenna is lower than that of
the single tri-band patch antenna design in Fig. 5. The measured
peak gain of the third passband is about 1.5 dB lower than the
simulated one. This may be caused by the fabrication errors and
poorer impedance matching in the third passband. The higher gain
at the nulls is mainly attributed to the measurement errors and the
fringe field resulting from the finite ground plane. Because of the
radiation nulls introduced by the antenna element and the asymmetric
parallel-coupled lines feeding structure, the out-of-band radiation is
considerably suppressed, achieving a good filtering performance.
IV. C ONCLUSION
A triple-band patch antenna utilizing the TM10 and modified TM20
and TM30 modes with the latter modified by a loading stub and a
slot on a single patch has been presented in this communication.
Flexible frequency tuning is achieved by altering the dimensions
of the patch, slot, and stub. Two radiation nulls are introduced by
the slot and the stub, making this antenna a good candidate for the
design of filtering antenna; such an antenna has also been discussed.
Both the tri-band antenna and the tri-band filtering antenna are
designed, fabricated, and measured. Good impedance matchings and
broadside radiation characteristics are achieved in all the three bands
on both antennas. The fabricated tri-band filtering antenna shows a
good filtering response and sharp roll off. The proposed multiband
antennas have good application prospects in modern communication
systems meeting multiple standards such as in WiMAX and WLAN
applications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Prof. M. J. Lancaster, University
of Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K., for his suggestions and help in
improving the language level of this communication. They would also
like to thank the reviewers and editors for their valuable advice that
improved this communication.
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