Improvement of Antenna Radiation Efficiency by the Suppression of Surface Waves

The characteristics of coplanar waveguide (CPW) fed ring antennas (such as gain, efficiency and polarization purity) are degraded by the dielectric losses and excitation of surface waves on the substrates. To counteract such effects, we propose to remove some portions of the substrate in the vicinity of the metallic patches, which effectively eliminates the conditions for the generation of surface waves. The proposed technique is applied to a CPW-fed ring antenna and a prototype model is fabricated. The measurement data and the computer simulation results agree well and indicate the efficacy of the technique for the improvement of antenna gain and efficiency.