Broadband printed dipole antenna with integrated balun and tuning element for DTV application

This paper presents the broadband printed dipole antenna design with an integrated balun and tuning element for DTV applications. The proposed technique is a unique tuning mechanism that is straddled between the gap of the proposed dipole antenna. This enables the frequency range of the dipole antenna to be adjusted to tightly cover the specified Digital TV band, thereby mitigating interference from signals outside the band that would otherwise degrade the quality of the DTV signal. The measured results confirm that the proposed antenna covers an impedance bandwidth of 414.5 MHz from 457.7 to 872.2 MHz, which covers the frequency band of DTV systems (470–862 MHz). Furthermore, the proposed antenna has excellent omnidirectional radiation with a maximum realized gain of 2.95 dBi. These results demonstrate the suitability of the antenna for DTV applications.