We present a novel printed monopole antenna for ultrawideband applications. The proposed antenna consists of a square radiating patch and a ground plane with cross-shaped slot and conductor-backed plane, which provides a wide usable fractional bandwidth of more than 130% (3.06-12.87 GHz). By cutting a modified cross-shaped slot with variable dimensions on the ground plane and also by inserting cross-shaped conductor-backed plane, additional resonances are excited and hence much wider impedance bandwidth can be produced, especially at the higher band. The designed antenna has a small size of 12 Â 18 mm 2 . Simulated and experimental results obtained for this antenna show that it exhibits good radiation behavior within the UWB frequency range.