Design and fabrication of a flexible Minkowski fractal antenna for VHF applications

Abstract

This work investigates the design of a flexible Minkowski fractal antenna. Two potential materials are included for examination - conductive copper tape and ShieldIt conductive textile. Both are designed and simulated to achieve a satisfactory resonance at the Very High Frequency (VHF) band for Land Mobile Radio (LMR) application through proper structure segmentation and iteration. Optimization concludes that the antenna is suitably fed using an L-shaped folded ground plane, with a Minkowski radiator of the third iteration (n3). The better performing material, i.e conductive copper tape, is used to fabricate an antenna. It is observed through measurements that the wearable antenna reaches a gain of larger than 0 dB and an efficiency of 48 %, with a size of less than 0.5 m.