An Approach to Equivalent Circuit Modeling of Rectangular Microstrip Antennas

Computation of the broadband matching potential of a microstrip antenna requires the wideband lumped equivalent circuit of the antenna. The general topology of the equivalent circuit of rectangular microstrip patch antennas has been used to model the feedpoint impedance of microstrip antennas over a wide frequency band and equivalent circuit parameters are determined using optimization techniques. The proposed procedure overcomes the problems of physical realizability of the equivalent circuit and estimation of the starting values of the optimization. Applying this technique, wideband lumped equivalent circuits of a rectangular and E-shaped microstrip antenna have been computed which are in good agreement with measurement data from 0.1 to 6 GHz.