Design, optimization, and realization of a wire antenna with a 25:1 bandwidth ratio for terrestrial communications

Wire antennas can be made wideband if the antenna is loaded with passive elements and connected to a lossless matching network. However, realization of the load component values and matching network can easily become impractical. In this study, using only a surface mount and standard component values, antenna loads and a matching network are optimized using genetic algorithms. The optimized design achieves a 25:1 bandwidth ratio, from 20 MHz to 500 MHz, with a maximum voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) of 3.5 and minimum system gain of --5 dBi. The antenna system gain at azimuth is taken as the objective function and an exact penalty function is formulated to take into account the VSWR over the design frequency band. A loaded antenna is built and measured to corroborate the simulations results. The realized antenna is only 0.14 lambda long at 20 MHz.