Design of Transparent Antenna Based on Uniform Metal Mesh

With the rapid development of mobile communication equipment, visible optically transparent antennas have attracted widespread attention due to their superior concealment, high integration and characteristics of easy commonality. However, traditional optically transparent antennas designed by transparent conductive material film are facing contradiction between optical transmittance and radiation performance. In this paper, two transparent antennas based on uniform metal mesh (UMM) are proposed: “T-shaped” antenna and “question mark”-shaped antenna, both of which are fed by coplanar waveguide structures. The antennas are designed to operate in the (1559–1610) MHz band. The transparent UMM film is fabricated by orthogonally distributed thin silver wires with the width of 20 μm and the period of 300 μm. While the optical transmittance (OT) of the T-shaped antenna using UMM reaches 82.6%, the gain of the T-shaped antenna using UMM has improved from -2.42 dBi to 0.62 dBi, compared to that of the T-shaped antenna by indium-tin-oxide (ITO) film. The OT of “Question mark”-shaped antenna using UMM reaches 91.8%, which is a significant improvement. The antenna design and optimization method based on UMM above can effectively improve the realized gain and radiation efficiency of optically transparent antennas without affecting optical transparency, which has certain academic value and engineering significance.