X-Band Microstrip Patch Antennas

The Introduction to Antennas course was the first time that I was enamoured with the thought of being some kind of RF engineer. The course was taught by Dr. Atef Z. Elsherbeni, a world renowned expert in the field of computational electromagnetics. He taught students how to simulate their antenna designs using a finite difference time domain full-wave EM solver called CEMS. One part of the course was fabricating and measuring the performance of a microstrip patch antenna. My antenna was designed for 4003C rogers substrate with a dielectric constant of 3.38 and a thickness of 60 mils. The patch was designed to resonate at 8.5 GHz (x-band) and the resonant frequency was confirmed with good agreement to simulation using a vector network analyzer.