A New Pencil-Beam Planar Dipole Array Antenna for IEEE 802.11ac Outdoor Access Point Routers

Abstract

In this contribution, a new design of pencil-beam planar dipole array antenna (PDAA) with reflector back has been designed and fabricated for IEEE 802.11ac outdoor applications. The proposed antenna is performed by combining a planar array and a reflector.

The planar array is comprised of 8 x 6 single elements which are placed on an FR4-epoxy substrate with the size of 24 mm × 194 mm × 1.6 mm. This design has very good simulation results in terms of the radiation pattern, gain and input impedance bandwidth.

A very high gain of 18.2 dBi has been achieved at 5.5 GHz, and the bandwidth is relatively wide with about 23% of the center frequency, which covers the whole bandwidth allocated for the application. A prototype has been fabricated and measured. The measurement results have very good agreements with the simulated data.