On the Use of Shorting Pins in the Design of Microstrip Patch Antennas

This paper reviews the use of shorting pins to achieve various performance characteristics of microstrip patch antennas. First, appropriately placed shorting pins can be used to tune the resonant frequencies of a rectangular patch antenna and to control the separation of a dual frequency rectangular patch antenna operating in the TM01 and TM03 modes. Second, shorting pins can be used to significantly reduce the sizes of the various patch antenna designs, including the simple regular patch, the wideband U-slot patch, and the wideband two layer stacked patches. Third, shorting pins are effective in widening the bandwidths of both the quarter wave patch and the regular patch. Both simulation and experimental results are presented and/or referenced.