Low-Profile Two-Port MIMO Terminal Antenna for Low LTE Bands with
Wideband Multimodal Excitation
Abstract
It is challenging to design multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
terminal antennas for LTE bands below 1 GHz, due to the conventional
chassis offering only one resonant characteristic mode. Recently, it was
shown that minor structural changes can yield additional resonant
mode(s), which were used to design two-port MIMO antennas. However, the
resulting bandwidth for the second port does not cover the low LTE
bands. Herein, a new approach to structural changes and feed design is
proposed for the design of a low profile (4 mm) two-port MIMO antenna
that covers all common low LTE bands (0.75-0.96 GHz) with total
efficiency of above 67%. The large symmetric bandwidth (25%) is
achieved using three additional resonant modes obtained by structural
changes as well as two simple probe-feed ports jointly exciting weighted
combinations of the four modes over frequency. The envelope correlation
coefficient of below 0.15 is facilitated by the different phase shifts
of the characteristic electric fields at the port locations. Moreover,
the design requires no ground clearance, no decoupling structure and the
two ports are separated by only 0.2 wavelength. Finally, to show design
flexibility, a third antenna is added to the top of the chassis to
create a three-port MIMO antenna