A multinotched octagonal shaped fractal UWB antenna

In this article, a simple design approach for small ultrawideband (UWB) antenna is presented. The small size and wideband operability is obtained by introducing Minkowski like fractal geometry in the design. It is observed that addition of fractal elements at the edges of octagonal shape leads to wideband phenomena. Furthermore, the insertion of multiple notches in the ground plane improves return loss characteristic in the desired UWB operational bandwidth of 3.1-10.6 GHz. The compact 16.5 × 13.5 mm2 antenna geometry size exhibits nearly omnidirectional radiation pattern, with VSWR?<?2 over the entire UWB frequency range. The optimized antenna is fabricated and measured using vector network analyzer. The measured characteristics are in good agreement with the simulated one. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.