LAUSR

ABSTRACT A half-mode substrate integrated waveguide (HMSIW) antenna covering industrial, scientific, and medical radio band at 5.8 GHz is designed, fabricated, and tested. An HMSIW technique is used to reduce the size to almost 50% while maintaining the same performance of the antenna. Afterwards, a semi-hexagonal slot is etched on the patch, which excites and tunes the dominant-mode of the cavity in the band of interest. Inspite of a substantial miniaturization, the proposed antenna provides a gain of 6.1 with front to back ratio of more than 10 dB along with a fair radiation efficiency of 83% in free space. In order to examine the performance of the antenna in the presence of a body, the antenna is tested on pork tissues. The measured on-body peak gain and simulated radiation efficiency are obtained as 5.25 and 69%, respectively. The antenna shows robust performance in the presence of pork tissues and the specific absorption rate value is under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines, which makes it a suitable choice for wireless body area network applications.