Abstract
Energy harvesting from ambient RF signals is feasible, particularly from the GSM bands such as 900MHz, 1800MHz and the 3G band at 2.1GHz. This requires a wideband receive antenna which can cover all these bands with decent gain performance and an omnidirectional radiation pattern. In this work, a novel Cantor fractal antenna has been designed which fulfills the above mentioned performance requirements. Antenna has been realized through a combination of 3D inkjet printing of plastic substrate and 2D inkjet printing of metallic nanoparticles based ink. The stable impedance and radiation performance of the antenna over a bandwidth of 0.8GHz to 2.2GHz (93 %) shows the feasibility of its employment in wide band energy harvesting applications.