Design of Single and Dual Element Micro-Strip Patch Antenna for Wi-Fi Applications

Antenna is designed with the primary motive to achieve good gain and bandwidth for the applications to which it is integrated. But, this motive would not be feasible through the use of a single patch antenna. The purpose of this study is to design a single element microstrip patch antenna for WiFi application. This antenna is to constitute a dielectric constant  = 4.4, and is purposed to function in 4.7GHz frequency. Studies on single and dual microstrip patches reveal that the gain doubles when the number of patch elements are increased. So, while retaining the size of the single patch, doubling the number of patches would also eventually double the gain achieved. Such antennas have wide applications for feeding networks and RF radiation in the communication field. The main advantages of patch antenna are its low cost, good performance, easy installation, and low profile. The patch antennas are designed using appropriate design equations and are tested against practical results to ensure that its simulated results match the practical results. This paper documents the designing of single and dual element patch antenna using the appropriate equations for application in Wi-Fi communication. The antenna is fabricated using the FR4 substrate and its simulated results of gain, return loss, impedance and VSWR are compared with the practical results. This type of antenna was originally designed for radio but now it is also used for 802.11 network systems, and in wireless routers and gadgets that work on WiFi network. The advantage of these antennas is that they are typically very directive and useful for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connections.