Tunable Handset Antenna: Enhancing Efficiency on TV White Spaces

With the future LTE auction for TV white spaces at 600 MHz, there is a strong need for efficient handset antennas operating at very low frequencies. This paper shows a tunable antenna covering the LTE bands from 600 MHz to 2.6 GHz. The antenna uses state-of-the-art MEMS tunable capacitors in order to reconfigure its operating frequency. In this work, the design mitigates the tuning loss with a tunable extended ground plane. The resulting dual-resonant antenna exhibits a peak total efficiency of -3.9 dB at 600 MHz.