| There is a pressing need for small radiators that can be integrated within soldier clothing/armor. Such body wearable antennas must meet RF communications requirements such as efficiency and bandwidth, operate within safety guidelines, and comply with low cost manufacturing techniques. The environment in which such antennas are typically mounted however is electromagnetically hostile and can severely degrade the radiator performance. This, along with the limited available real estate, creates an extremely challenging problem. Antenna size reduction techniques and fabrication procedures utilized in commercial communications can be applied to military communications. Techniques that reduce the radiation directed towards the user are also applicable. In this work we utilize these technologies to create an antenna for body wearable applications. The radiator operates at frequencies below 500 MHz (e.g. for EPLRS) where antenna size is a critical issue.
We have developed and prototyped a thin, uni-planar printed antenna for body wearable applications that is electrically small and as a consequence has a near omni-directional radiation pattern. The antenna is based on a folded meander line slot radiator and uses a short circuit near the feed location to provide a good impedance match at the frequency of operation. The low cost antenna has a 10 dB return loss bandwidth of approximately 5 % and a gain of near 0 dBi. In our full paper we will present the typical performance (return loss, radiation patterns, and gain) of this form of radiator. We will also discuss how the various design parameters impact the return loss and radiation performance of the new small antenna, and how to achieve optimum radiator performance. We will describe how the antenna can be fabricated into a body wearable version and discuss some of the trade-offs associated with this application, including the use of Artificial Magnetic Conductors to improve the radiation performance and SAR.
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| Rod Waterhouse (S'90-M'94-SM'01) received his BEng, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia, in 1987, 1989 and 1994, respectively. In 1994 he joined RMIT University as a Lecturer, become a Senior Lecturer in 1997 and an Associate Professor in 2002. In 2001 he took a leave of absence from RMIT and joined the venture-backed Dorsal Networks which was later acquired by Corvis Corporation. Since 2003 Dr. Waterhouse has been with Pharad, LLC, a
broadband wireless communications company located in MD that he co-founded and where he is now a Vice-president. His 2003 book on printed antenna design follows more than 200 publications and seven patent applications in the field of antennas, electromagnetics, microwave and photonics engineering. Dr Waterhouse is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagations. He also chaired the IEEE Victorian MTTS/APS Chapter from 1998 - 2001. Dr. Waterhouse is an adjunct Senior Fellow within the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne.
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