In this paper, a novel planar active artificial magnetic conductor (AAMC) frequency-reconfigurable antenna printed on an FR4 substrate is proposed. Its AAMC metal pattern in a unit cell consists of a compound-five-ring nesting (CFRN) structure. It is loaded with only one varactor diode connected to the ground plane by a metallic via. In comparison to the conventional single-circle-ring AMC, the dimension of the CFRN-AMC has been reduced by about 44% along with a lower reflection loss. The frequency-reconfigurable antenna is constructed by placing a triangle-shaped dipole antenna operating at 1.8 GHz over the proposed active CFRN-AMC ground plane consisted with 5×5 periodic unit cells. The prototype of the CFRN-AMC-backed antenna was fabricated and measured. The measured results agree well with the simulated data. It is found that by tuning the capacitance applied on the CFRN-AMC from 2.2 to 0.5 pF, the frequency band of the AMC-based antenna has been varied in the range of 1.51 through 2.12 GHz along with the highest radiation gain of 5.37 dBi at 1.74 GHz. This gain is about 3.16 dB higher than that of the antenna without using the AMC. In addition, the presented CFRN-AMC-based antenna remains a very low profile, since the separation distance between the antenna and the AMC plane is only 2 mm or 0.012λ, where the λ denotes the wavelength at 1.8 GHz in free space.
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