A Systematic Design Method of On-Glass Antennas Using Mesh-Grid Structures

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a systematic design method for an on-glass antenna, which is suitable for receiving frequency modulation (FM) radio in a commercial recreational vehicle (RV). For the main antenna body, we used a mesh-grid structure that most efficiently uses the given space of the glass for broad-matching bandwidth. To obtain the detail design parameters that exhibit optimum radiating performance, we used a genetic algorithm (GA) in conjunction with a full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulator. To reduce the searching space in our GA process, we applied a connection-warranted filtering. After the GA optimization, we also applied a shape-simplification process and a transparency-improvement process to broaden the passenger's field of view. The designed antenna shows an average gain of about -9.05 dBi along the bore-sight direction (theta = 90 degrees, phi = 270 degrees) in the FM radio band (80-120 MHz), which is 10 dB higher than a commercial roof-mounted microantenna. Finally, the operating principle of the proposed antenna was examined by using a lumped-element circuit model, and these results confirmed that the proposed antenna is well suited for FM radio reception in commercial RVs.