Semicircular Aperture Coupled Hemispherical Dielectric Resonator Antenna

A compact, low profile semicircular aperture coupled hemispherical dielectric resonator antenna (HDRA) is presented in this paper. The HDRA is fed by a microstrip line through a semicircular aperture in the ground plane. The proposed antenna resonates at 3.7 GHz in TE111 mode with an impedance bandwidth of 10.8% (3.54?3.94 GHz), which can be effectively used for WiMAX applications. The maximum gain obtained is 5.4 dBi at 3.8 GHz. The experimental results show good agreement with the simulated results. A detailed parametric study has been conducted to realize the effects of slot radius, slot width and slot position to improve the coupling of the designed antenna.