The integration of compact printed multielement antenna (MEA) systems on small diversity and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) terminal devices operating in the 5.2 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band is presented. The investigated MEA systems comprise up to six printed elements (inverted F and Minkowski monopole antennas) and their performance is evaluated by means of the effective diversity gain (EDG) and the 1% outage MIMO capacity. The role of the propagation environment (both outdoor and indoor) on EDG is examined, proving that the uniform scenario is a good approximation to many real environments. The tradeoff study between system's performance and number of integrated antenna elements indicates that both diversity and MIMO performance saturate when placing more than five closely spaced elements. Even the least efficient 6-element system however, can be advantageously used as a reconfigurable 2-element array under the concept of receive antenna selection, since it provides significantly improved MIMO performance over a conventional 2-element fixed one. The paper concludes with a summary of useful guidelines for the MEA design optimization procedure that emanated from this study.Index Terms-Antenna diversity, antenna selection, diversity gain, multiple input multiple output (MIMO) capacity, monopole antennas, printed circuit antennas.

A comprehensive and unique set of measurements of the complex-dielectric constant of sea ice, performed at several frequencies in the range 0.1–7.5 GHz, is described. In addition, a brief survey of previously published results is given and a set of dielectric models describing the complex-dielectric behavior of sea ice, over the frequency range 0.1–40 GHz, is discussed.

The development of small integrated antennas plays a significant role in the progress of the rapidly expanding commercial communication applications. This paper addresses the analysis and design of a printed on a PCMCIA card Inverted F Antenna (IFA), which is compact, easy to manufacture, efficient with an omni-directional pattern and 250 MHz bandwidth. The performance of the integrated IFA/PCMCIA system was simulated using two commercial Method of Moments codes and validated with measurements on a fabricated prototype.

A free-space and in-waveguide dielectric constant measurement facility at 10 and 35 GHz is described. Results are presented for the dielectric constant and loss of both fresh and sea ice at these frequencies, and are interpreted in terms of a dielectric model of sea ice. Suggestions are made for possible improvements in the model and the measurement technique.

No abstract