A small‐size reconfigurable smartphone antenna using a PIN diode for WWAN/LTE and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) smartphone application is presented. When the diode is in ‘OFF’ state, a T‐shaped feeding strip and an encircled T‐shaped parasitic shorted strip formed a coupled‐fed antenna, which achieves a low‐wideband covering GSM850/900 bands and a high‐wideband covering GSM1800/1900/UMTS2100/LTE2300/2500 bands. When the diode is in ‘ON’ state, a loop antenna working at 1/2 wavelengths is formed to cover the bands of GNSS, which includes four positioning systems (COMPASS, GALILEO, GPS and GLONASS). In addition, the proposed antenna is easily printed on a small ground clearance of 375 mm2 without loading any lumped element. Also, the proposed simple and compact antenna is convenient to be optimised for desired bands. Finally, the good agreement of simulated and experimental results proves that the proposed antenna is suitable for practical mobile terminal equipment.

A compact small-size coupled-fed antenna composed of an inverted L-shaped feeding strip and a shorting strip with double branches for the WWAN/LTE bands operation in the internal smartphone application is presented. With the help of a novel distributed LC resonant circuit, the proposed antenna can not only realize the miniaturization (15 × 28 × 4 mm 3 ) and multiband to cover 2G/3G/4G bands but also be tuned and optimized easily. The measured bandwidth with 3 : 1 VSWR is 163 MHz (804-967 MHz) at the low-band and 1615 MHz (1665-3280 MHz) at the high-band. What is more, the lowest measured efficiency in the whole frequency band is more than 52% for practical applications. The operating principles and main parameters are detailed below. And successful simulation, fabrication, and measurement of the proposed antenna are shown in this paper.

A compact small‐size LTE/WWAN planar printed antenna for ultrathin smartphone application is presented, which achieves two wide operating bands of 647–972 MHz and 1605–2770 MHz to cover LTE (LTE700/2300/2500) and WWAN (GSM850/900/1800/1900/UMTS2100) bands. A feeding strip and an inverted M‐shaped parasitic shorting strip are combined to form the proposed coupled‐fed antenna with a simple structure and small size of 15 × 36 mm2. So it can be easily printed on the circuit board and it is convenient to adjust antenna performance. At the same time, a rectangular notch on the circuit board not only can be used to place the battery for ultrathin smartphone application but also changes the ground plane current path to achieve a better impedance matching, especially in the low‐band (698–960 MHz). Moreover, the proposed antenna allows tighter integration of multiple electronic components, such as USB, microphone. In addition, the design process and measured results of the proposed antenna are also provided below. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 57:2116–2120, 2015