LAUSR

A horizontally polarized omnidirectional antenna with enhanced impedance bandwidth is presented in this letter. The proposed antenna consists of a feeding network, four printed dipole elements with etched slots, parasitic strips, and director elements. Four identically curved and printed dipole elements are placed in a square array and fed by a feeding network with uniform magnitude and phase; thus, the proposed antenna can achieve an omnidirectional radiation. To enhance the impedance bandwidth, parasitic strips and etched slots are introduced to produce additional lower and upper resonant frequencies, respectively. By utilizing four director elements, the gain variation in the horizontal plane can be improved, especially for the upper frequency band. With the structure, a reduced size of $0.63\,\lambda _{L} \times 0.63\,\lambda _{L} \times 0.01\,\lambda _{L}$ ($\lambda _{L}$ is the free-space wavelength at the lowest frequency) is obtained. The proposed antenna is designed and fabricated. Measurement results reveal that the proposed antenna can provide an impedance bandwidth of 84.2% (1.58–3.88 GHz). Additionally, the gain variation in the horizontal plane is less than 1.5 dB over the frequency band 1.58–3.50 GHz, and increased to 2.2 dB at 3.80 GHz. Within the impedance bandwidth, the cross-polarization level is less than –23 dB in the horizontal plane.