In this paper, we propose an electrically small antenna consisting of a composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) and a non-Foster matching circuit. An interdigital capacitor (IDC) and spiral inductor are used to fabricate the very high frequency (VHF) band antenna based on CRLH TL. The size of the proposed antenna is as small as 0.025 × 0.014 × 0.0008 λ at 145.5 MHz using the zeroth-order resonant generated by the CRLH TL. The antenna operation bandwidth is extended by the non-Foster circuit (NFC) consisting of a pair of transistors in a cross-coupled manner. An antenna prototype is fabricated and the input impedance, the received power, and gain of the proposed antenna are measured. The results show that the broadband characteristic is maintained while the form factor is extremely small compared to the wavelength. The average received power enhancement and increased bandwidth of antenna are 17.3 dB and 335.5 MHz (from 249.2–268.2 to 145.5–500 MHz), respectively. The calculated gain of the proposed antenna with the non-Foster is about −45 dBi at 155 MHz. The proposed antenna can be considered as a potential candidate of a low-profile antenna for military ground communications at the VHF band.

A non-Foster circuit (NFC) is known as an active broadband matching technique to improve the impedance matching bandwidth of an electrically small antenna (ESA). There has been a vast amount of papers that report the generation of negative impedance using an NFC and its effectiveness on broadband antenna matching. However, only a few discussed its impact on the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), which is one of the most important figures-of-merit for a wireless communication system. In this paper, the SNR enhancement due to an NFC was measured and discussed. An NFC was carefully designed to have a low dissipation loss and to meet the stability conditions. The optimized NFC design was fabricated and applied to an ESA length of λ⁄15 at a frequency range of 150 to 300 MHz. The measured results showed that the NFC enhanced the received power of the antenna system by more than 17 dB. However, due to the noise added by the NFC, the SNR enhancement was not guaranteed for some frequency points. Nevertheless, an average of 7.3 dB of SNR improvement over the frequency band of interest is possible based on the experiment result.

In this paper, we describe the design, fabrication, and measurement results of a non-Foster circuit for improving the wideband matching and receiver power of small antennas. The antennas under consideration are a small monopole antenna and a small inverted F antenna. These antennas experience excessive C and L respectively; which makes it difficult to match their wideband impedance performance. To cancel out the excess C, a negative C non-Foster circuit is designed whereas a negative L non-Foster circuit is designed to cancel out the excess L. An important factor in the design of a non-Foster circuit is the stability, which is obtained by simultaneously considering the open circuit stability condition and transient response. According to the simulation, the optimized non-Foster circuit operates with negative C and L at 100～500 MHz, and it is fabricated with a PCB process and applied to the antennas. The reflection coefficients of the small monopole antenna and the inverted F antenna with non-Foster circuits are less than −10 dB at 150～400 MHz and 220～330 MHz, respectively. In addition, we measured the receiver power using antennas with non-Foster circuits. The small monopole antenna improved by 10.3 dB on average while the small inverted F antenna improved by 7.5 dB, at this frequency band.

In this paper, we propose an ultra high frequency(UHF) band military antenna using composite right/left handed(CRLH) transmission lines and non-Foster circuits. The antenna uses the zeroth-order characteristic of the CRLH transmission line in order to miniaturize the antenna. The non-Foster circuit's negative capacitance can offset the input reactance of the antenna to improve bandwidth. The size of the CRLH transmission line antenna is 20.9×13.2×1.6 mm 3 and the size of the non-Foster circuit is 20×14.4×1.6 mm 3. The measured received power of the antenna is improved by an average of 19.96 dB at 250～500 MHz.