Compact Efficient Electrically Small Broadband Antennas

Recent advances in electrically small antennas have been proposed for a range of communications applications. In general these antennas have wide impedance bandwidths, but low efficiency and power handling capabilities. Recently members of our team at the University of Arizona have developed a class of efficient electrically small antennas (EESAs) that we call the EZ antenna that gets around these limitations through careful design of the space-loading of the antenna. The loading strategies we have pursued are based on advances in the field of metmaterials. We have designed and built prototype systems throughout the 100 MHz – 10GHz frequency rantes, but our designs have not been optimized or tested for HPM applications. In this proposal, we seek to alter the strategies proposed for low-voltage electrically small geometries and adapt them to handle high input voltages and powers.