A compact indoor digital antenna for digital terrestrial television is proposed. The design of the antenna begins with the material selection to construct the antenna by using CST software with a standard monopole antenna design. The antenna is then simulated and optimized. A bandwidth of 290 MHz (46.14%) between 500 MHz and 790 MHz is achieved with the antenna gain more than 3 dBi. Simulated results is used to demonstrate the performance of the antenna. The simulated return losses, together with the radiation patterns and gain are presented and discussed.
Keyword:Digital antenna DTTB DVB-T2
INTRODUCTIONMalaysia is one of the country in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which is currently undergo the process of transition from analog to digital television broadcasting. Digital Video Broadcasting -Terestrial 2 (DVB-T2) has been chosen by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) for the broadcast transmission standard for the country's digital terrestrial television. Due to the increasing interest in digital television (DTV) broadcasting, a compact DTV antenna for indoor terrestrial signal reception antenna is needed. Moreover, when it comes to size, a DTV antenna should be compact, small and easy to place anywhere. The designed DTV antennas that are currently available are quite large and bulky. There are several numbers of compact DTV antennas have been reported in the past research, but these antennas do not match the standard performance for indoor use.In [1], a printed spiral antenna with a self-complementary configuration was developed. This antenna has a spiral shaped metal strips and slots provided on ground planes as their counterparts. There are two types of antenna configuration, single and twin spiral that were fabricated. According to [1], for single spiral with unbalanced feed, their widths of metal strip and slot were at 0.5 mm. The spiral has 14 turns with a total dimension of 30 mm × 30 mm. Based on the measured results the return loss is not better than -5 dB within the UHF bandwidth which is between 400 MHz and 700 MHz for the single spiral. However, for the twin spiral with balanced feed, excellent return loss is obtained, which is less than -10 dB. Although the twin self-complementary spiral antenna has a good return loss that is less than -10 dB, the antenna becomes 60 mm × 60 mm, which is double compared with the single spiral self-complementary antenna. According to the past research, another digital indoor antenna that has been proposed in [2] was J-shaped monopole antenna array. The antenna consists of J-shaped /4 monopole antenna array with a coplanar waveguide feed.
