Design of Orthogonal MIMO Handset Antennas Based on Characteristic Mode Manipulation at Frequency Bands Below 1 GHz

Multi-antenna design in compact mobile handsets at frequency bands below 1 GHz is very challenging, since severe mutual coupling is commonly induced by simultaneous excitation of the chassis' fundamental dipole mode by more than one antenna element. To address this problem, a novel multi-antenna design approach is proposed herein to obtain efficient and uncorrelated antennas. By manipulating the chassis structure, more than one characteristic mode is enabled to resonate at frequencies below 1 GHz. With proper excitations for different characteristic modes, which are orthogonal to each other, well matched multi-antennas with low coupling and correlation are achieved. A chassis loaded with two T-shaped metal strips above its longer edges is taken as an example modification to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design approach at 900 MHz. This modification creates a new characteristic mode which resonates near 900 MHz. Afterward, two antenna feeds were designed to efficiently excite the chassis' fundamental dipole mode and the T-strip mode with very low correlation. The T-strip antenna covers LTE Band 8 (880-960 MHz), and the dipole mode antenna covers both LTE Band 5 (824-894 MHz) and LTE Band 8. The proposed dual-antenna design was found to outperform a reference design significantly, both with and without user interactions (i.e., one-hand and two-hand data grips). Practical aspects of mobile handset antennas are also investigated. The prototype was also fabricated and measured, and the measured results show reasonable agreements with the simulated results.