The microwave near-field detection technique is of interest to many researchers for characterizing materials because of its high sensitivity. It is based on sensing buried objects by producing an evanescent field.The advantage of evanescent fields is their capability to interrogate electrically small objects. In the past, near-field probes have been designed to sense magnetic materials. For dielectric materials, a near-field probe that senses the permittivity of the materials is important. This work presents a novel design of a near-field probe that generates a dominant electric eld. The probe is an electrically small dipole measuring approximately 0.07?? in length operating at 216.3 MHz. The antenna is matched to a 50??? system using two chip inductors distributed symmetrically on the dipole. The numerical and measurement results show that the proposed design is highly sensitive and capable of sensing subsurface object. The proposed design is compact, lightweight and applicable for microwave applications.

With the increasing demand for high performance communication networks and the proliferation of mobile devices, significant advances in antenna design are essential. In recent years the rising demands of the mobile wireless communication industry have forced antennas to have increased performance while being limited to an ever decreasing footprint. Such design constraints have forced antenna designers to consider frequency agile antennas so that their behavior can adapt with changing system requirements or environmental conditions. Frequency agile antennas used for mobile handset applications must also be inexpensive, robust, and make use of electronic switching with reasonable DC power consumption. Previous works have addressed a number of these requirements but relatively little work has been performed on frequency agile dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs). The objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of DRAs for frequency reconfigurability. DRAs are an attractive option due to their compactness, very low losses leading to high radiation efficiencies (better than 95%) and fairly wide bandwidths compared to alternatives. DRA’s are also well suited for mobile communications since they can be placed on a ground plane and are by nature low gain antennas whose radiation patterns typically resemble those of short electric or magnetic dipoles. One way to electronically reconfigure a DRA, in the sense of altering the frequency band over which the input reflection coefficient of the antenna is below some threshold, is to partially load one face of the DRA with a conducting surface. By altering the way in which this surface connects to the groundplane on which the DRA is mounted, the DRA can be reconfigured due to changes in its mode structure. This connection was first made using several conducting tabs which resulted in a tuning range of 69% while having poor cross polarization performance. In order to address the poor cross polarization performance a second conducting surface was placed on the opposing DRA wall. This technique significantly reduced the cross polarization levels while obtaining a tuning range of 83%. The dual-wall conductively loaded DRA was then extended to include a full electronic implementation using PIN diodes and varactor diodes in order to achieve discrete and continuous tuning respectively. The two techniques both achieved discrete tuning ranges of 95% while the varactor implementation also had a continuous tuning range of 59% while both maintaining an acceptable cross polarization level.

With the increasing demand for high performance communication networks and the proliferation of mobile devices, significant advances in antenna design are essential. In recent years the rising demands of the mobile wireless communication industry have forced antennas to have increased performance while being limited to an ever decreasing footprint. Such design constraints have forced antenna designers to consider frequency agile antennas so that their behavior can adapt with changing system requirements or environmental conditions. Frequency agile antennas used for mobile handset applications must also be inexpensive, robust, and make use of electronic switching with reasonable DC power consumption. Previous works have addressed a number of these requirements but relatively little work has been performed on frequency agile dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs). The objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of DRAs for frequency reconfigurability. DRAs are an attractive option due to their compactness, very low losses leading to high radiation efficiencies (better than 95%) and fairly wide bandwidths compared to alternatives. DRA’s are also well suited for mobile communications since they can be placed on a ground plane and are by nature low gain antennas whose radiation patterns typically resemble those of short electric or magnetic dipoles. One way to electronically reconfigure a DRA, in the sense of altering the frequency band over which the input reflection coefficient of the antenna is below some threshold, is to partially load one face of the DRA with a conducting surface. By altering the way in which this surface connects to the groundplane on which the DRA is mounted, the DRA can be reconfigured due to changes in its mode structure. This connection was first made using several conducting tabs which resulted in a tuning range of 69% while having poor cross polarization performance. In order to address the poor cross polarization performance a second conducting surface was placed on the opposing DRA wall. This technique significantly reduced the cross polarization levels while obtaining a tuning range of 83%. The dual-wall conductively loaded DRA was then extended to include a full electronic implementation using PIN diodes and varactor diodes in order to achieve discrete and continuous tuning respectively. The two techniques both achieved discrete tuning ranges of 95% while the varactor implementation also had a continuous tuning range of 59% while both maintaining an acceptable cross polarization level.

ITC/USA 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / In this paper, a new technique utilizing a scatterer of high dielectric constant in between electrically small antennas to achieve good Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performance is demonstrated. The phase information of the received signal at the antennas is utilized for direction estimation. The impact of the property of the scatterer on the directional sensitivity and the output signal to noise ratio (SNR) level are studied. Finally the DOA estimation accuracy is analyzed with the proposed technique under the consumption of white Gaussian noise environment.

With the increasing demand for high performance communication networks and the proliferation of mobile devices, significant advances in antenna design are essential. In recent years the rising demands of the mobile wireless communication industry have forced antennas to have increased performance while being limited to an ever decreasing footprint. Such design constraints have forced antenna designers to consider frequency agile antennas so that their behavior can adapt with changing system requirements or environmental conditions. Frequency agile antennas used for mobile handset applications must also be inexpensive, robust, and make use of electronic switching with reasonable DC power consumption. Previous works have addressed a number of these requirements but relatively little work has been performed on frequency agile dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs). The objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of DRAs for frequency reconfigurability. DRAs are an attractive option due to their compactness, very low losses leading to high radiation efficiencies (better than 95%) and fairly wide bandwidths compared to alternatives. DRA’s are also well suited for mobile communications since they can be placed on a ground plane and are by nature low gain antennas whose radiation patterns typically resemble those of short electric or magnetic dipoles. One way to electronically reconfigure a DRA, in the sense of altering the frequency band over which the input reflection coefficient of the antenna is below some threshold, is to partially load one face of the DRA with a conducting surface. By altering the way in which this surface connects to the groundplane on which the DRA is mounted, the DRA can be reconfigured due to changes in its mode structure. This connection was first made using several conducting tabs which resulted in a tuning range of 69% while having poor cross polarization performance. In order to address the poor cross polarization performance a second conducting surface was placed on the opposing DRA wall. This technique significantly reduced the cross polarization levels while obtaining a tuning range of 83%. The dual-wall conductively loaded DRA was then extended to include a full electronic implementation using PIN diodes and varactor diodes in order to achieve discrete and continuous tuning respectively. The two techniques both achieved discrete tuning ranges of 95% while the varactor implementation also had a continuous tuning range of 59% while both maintaining an acceptable cross polarization level.

With the increasing demand for high performance communication networks and the proliferation of mobile devices, significant advances in antenna design are essential. In recent years the rising demands of the mobile wireless communication industry have forced antennas to have increased performance while being limited to an ever decreasing footprint. Such design constraints have forced antenna designers to consider frequency agile antennas so that their behavior can adapt with changing system requirements or environmental conditions. Frequency agile antennas used for mobile handset applications must also be inexpensive, robust, and make use of electronic switching with reasonable DC power consumption. Previous works have addressed a number of these requirements but relatively little work has been performed on frequency agile dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs). The objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of DRAs for frequency reconfigurability. DRAs are an attractive option due to their compactness, very low losses leading to high radiation efficiencies (better than 95%) and fairly wide bandwidths compared to alternatives. DRA’s are also well suited for mobile communications since they can be placed on a ground plane and are by nature low gain antennas whose radiation patterns typically resemble those of short electric or magnetic dipoles. One way to electronically reconfigure a DRA, in the sense of altering the frequency band over which the input reflection coefficient of the antenna is below some threshold, is to partially load one face of the DRA with a conducting surface. By altering the way in which this surface connects to the groundplane on which the DRA is mounted, the DRA can be reconfigured due to changes in its mode structure. This connection was first made using several conducting tabs which resulted in a tuning range of 69% while having poor cross polarization performance. In order to address the poor cross polarization performance a second conducting surface was placed on the opposing DRA wall. This technique significantly reduced the cross polarization levels while obtaining a tuning range of 83%. The dual-wall conductively loaded DRA was then extended to include a full electronic implementation using PIN diodes and varactor diodes in order to achieve discrete and continuous tuning respectively. The two techniques both achieved discrete tuning ranges of 95% while the varactor implementation also had a continuous tuning range of 59% while both maintaining an acceptable cross polarization level.

Implanted Devices are important components of the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) as a promising technology in biotelemetry, e-health care and hyperthermia applications. The design of WBAN faces many challenges, such as frequency band selection, channel modeling, antenna design, physical layer (PHY) protocol design, medium access control (MAC) protocol design and power source. This research focuses on the design of implanted antennas, channel modeling between implanted devices and Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) for implanted devices. An implanted antenna needs to be small while it maintains Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) and is able to cope with the detuning effect due to the electrical properties of human body tissues. Most of the proposed antennas for implanted applications are electric field antennas, which have a high near-zone electric field and, therefore, a high SAR and are sensitive to the detuning effect. This work is devoted to designing a miniaturized magnetic field antenna to overcome the above limitations. The proposed Electrically Coupled Loop Antenna (ECLA) has a low electric field in the near-zone and, therefore, has a small SAR and is less sensitive to the detuning effect. The performance of ECLA, channel model between implanted devices using Path Loss (PL) and WPT for implanted devices are studied inside different human body models using simulation software and validated using experimental work. The study is done at different frequency bands: Medical Implanted Communication Services (MICS) band, Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) band and 3.5 GHz band using ECLA. It was found that the proposed ECLA has a better performance compared to the previous designs of implanted antennas. Based on our study, the MICS band has the best propagation channel inside the human body model among the allowed frequency bands. The maximum PL inside the human body between an implanted antenna and a base station on the surface is about 90 dB. WPT for implanted devices has been investigated as well, and it has been shown that for a device located at 2 cm inside the human body with an antenna radius of 1 cm an efficiency of 63% can be achieved using the proposed ECLA. / Ph. D.

The desire to counter multipath effects and improve communication links between mobile wireless systems in dense environment has led to much research in implementing antenna diversity. Space diversity, utilizing two or more antennas separated several wavelengths from one another, is one of the most popular method to achieve this operation. Meanwhile, polarization diversity, utilizing two orthogonal polarizations, has become more attractive in reducing cost and size of antenna systems. Polarization diversity is achieved using two orthogonal feeds to excite the two orthogonal polarization planes of the antenna. The challenge associated with designing dual polarized antennas is the need to reduce isolation between the feed and cross polarization level while maintaining a high efficiency. While a number of studies are successful in realizing polarization diversity, their antenna structure typically present more complex structures involving multiple layers. This thesis presents a novel method to implement polarization diversity on a miniature antenna using a simple planar structure. The antenna structure uses two crossed slots further miniaturized using a method derived from a recent study on miniaturized spiral slot antenna. At an operating frequency of ~ 1 GHz, the antenna is capable of achieving efficiency greater than 90% with a size as small as 0.08 .? x 0.08? The dual polarization operation is achieved by exciting the magnetic currents of the crossed slots with two orthogonal coplanar waveguide feeds. Simulation results of the proposed antenna yield an isolation > 15 dB with cross polarization levels > 10 dB. Theantenna structure was designed using CST Microwave Studio and the simulations were performed using IE3D simulation software.

Pour faire cohabiter les nombreuses technologies radios, les terminaux mobiles nécessitent une miniaturisation de plus en plus poussée des antennes. Toutefois, les performances d'antennes ont des limites fondamentales liées à leurs dimensions physiques. La littérature met en évidence que les réseaux superdirectifs permettent de dépasser la limite de Harrington sur la directivité et que des antennes adaptées par des circuits non-Foster peuvent dépasser la limite de Bode-Fano sur la bande passante. Les contributions essentielles de ce travail de thèse consistent en la conception deréseaux d'antennes superdirectifs et d'antennes adaptées par des circuits non-Foster comme solutions possibles pour l'amélioration des performances des Antennes Electriquement Petites (AEP). Dans une première partie, un convertisseur d'impédance négative est réalisé pour obtenir des condensateurs de valeurs négatives de façon à adapter des antennes miniatures sur une large bande de fréquence. Dans la deuxième partie de ces travaux, les limites théoriques des réseaux d'antennes superdirectifs sont évaluées et une approche simple et pratique permettant la conception de ces réseaux à partir d'éléments parasites est proposée. L'intégration des AEP superdirectives sur des cartes de circuit imprimé est étudiée et les difficultés de mesure de ce type d'antenne sont évaluées. A partir de ces résultats, une nouvelle stratégie pour réaliser des réseaux compactes 3D ou planaires à polarisation linéaire ou circulaire en utilisant des éléments superdirectifs est présentée. / For supporting different wireless technologies, mobile terminals require significant miniaturization of antennas. However, antennas performance has some fundamental limits related to their physical dimensions. The available theory shows that superdirective arrays can exceed Harrington’s limit on antenna directivity and non-Foter matched antennas can surpass Bode-Fano limit on antenna bandwidth. Therefore, this work focuses on the design of superdirective antenna arrays and non-Foster matched antennas as possible solutions for improving the performance of Electrically Small Antennas (ESAs). In the first part: a Negative Impedance Converter (NIC) is designed to have a very small negative capacitor. The circuit is evaluated in terms of gain, stability and linearity. Then, the circuit is used to match several small antennas in the UHF band. In the second part: the theoretical limits of superdirective antenna arrays are studied. A simple and practical approach to design parasitic antenna arrays is proposed. The integration of superdirective ESAs in Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) is studied and the difficulties of measuring this type of antennasare evaluated. A new strategy for the design of 3D or planar compact arrays, with linear or circular-polarization, using superdirective elements is presented.

This project is focused on computer modeling of so-called meta-materials, and on the exploitation of metamaterials in the design of electrically small antennas. For modeling, COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3 was used. Simulations were focused on impedance matching of antennas. Antennas with metamaterials were compared with corresponding conventional antennas without metamaterial layers. The project does not investigate the creation of metamaterials; the project concentrates on their influence on crucial parameters of antennas. Next step this project is focused on optimalization this structure in program Matlab version R2009b. We used optimalization method PSO (swarms of particles) and results are comparing whit results calculating in COMSOL program.