Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Proximity Coupled Transparent Patch Antenna for WLAN

ABSTRACTThe design, fabrication, and testing of a compact, low profile transparent micro-strip patch antenna is reported in this paper. The antenna is developed on a soda lime glass substrate with Fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) (surface resistivity is 15 Ω/sq and optical transmittance of about 80%) as the conductive layers. The radiating patch is excited electromagnetically through proximity coupled feeding technique and the feed is connected through a cold soldering method. The parameters that affect the optical transmittance and conductivity of the antenna are theoretically analyzed using Drude's model. The antenna is designed to operate at 4.9 GHz. The prototype antenna is fabricated and experimental results are presented. The fabricated antenna has a peak realized gain of 5.16 dBi with 800 MHz impedance bandwidth for the reference reflection coefficient of −10 dB. The realized optical transmittance of the device is greater than 60% in the visible region.