Design of a location-tracking antenna for transport containers

ABSTRACT This article presents the design of a GPS/GLONASS bandwidth antenna used to track location information of containers and a GSM/WCDMA antenna to transmit information over mobile networks. Both antennas are placed within a single board. A microstrip patch antenna capable of supporting both GPS and GLONASS was optimized and sized at 25 × 25 × 5 mm3. A chip monopole antenna capable of supporting both GSM and WCDMA bandwidths was optimized and sized at 27 × 8 × 3.2 mm3. To amplify the reception level from satellites, a two‐stage low noise amplifier was designed. The gain was 27 dB. The jig used to measure the antenna size is 100 × 30 × 1 mm3. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 57:310–314, 2015