Role of Antenna in Wireless communication is really vital whether it is point to point wireless communication or Wi-Fi. The size of antenna should be compact. In this work a novel design of the metamaterial based unit cell 7X7 arrays has been used as superstrate for the gain enhancement of a microstrip patch antenna operating at 7.1 GHz frequency. This frequency lies in the C-band which is normally used in satellite communication. Due to the unusual properties, metamaterial can change the electric and magnetic property of electromagnetic wave passing through it. Hence metamaterial is used in the fabrication of antenna enhanced the required properties. The proposed design provides a high gain of 9.4 dB using a superstrate, when suspended above a microstrip patch at 7.1 GHz. Simulation and measurement results confirm that near-zero index metamaterial (NZIM) array significantly improves the gain (by more than 1.8 dBi) and reduces the half power beamwidth in both E-plane and H-plane by 20o. The S parameters are extracted using HFSS,which is a Finite-Element-Method (FEM)-based full-wave simulator.

Microstrip Patch Antenna, Frequency 7.1GHz, NZIM cell array, ANSOFT HFSS Software, Gain, Return loss

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