We present the design of a novel compact coplanar waveguide‐fed antenna with fractal s‐shaped patches for multiband applications. The antenna consists of three fractal s‐shaped patches with different lengths. We demonstrate that the number of resonant frequencies is in direct proportion with the number of fractal s‐shaped patches. This is to say that, the number of resonant frequencies in a multiband antenna can be increased by increasing the number of patches. The resonant frequencies can be selected by carefully adjusting the length of the patches. We have designed our antenna to operate at 2.5/5.3/7.1/8.4 GHz. The measurement results show that the proposed antenna has 10 dB impedance bandwidths of 622 MHz (2.322–2.944 GHz), 466 MHz (5.113–5.579 GHz), 121 MHz (6.890–7.011 GHz) and 1080 MHz (8.206–9.286 GHz) to cover all the 2.4 GHz Bluetooth, 5.5 GHz WiMAX, and 2.4/5.2 GHz WLAN bands. The latter two bands of our proposed antenna fall within the X band range which finds vast applications in radar, aircraft, spacecraft and mobile or satellite communication system. The proposed antenna is printed on a single‐layered FR4 substrate, and it occupies a small volume of 17 × 18 × 1.6 mm3. The simulated and measured performance of the antenna confirms its omnidirectional radiation pattern and quad‐band operation. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 59:541–546, 2017