Design of a rectenna system for GSM-900 band using novel broadside 2 × 1 array antenna

In this study, a rectenna operating at the GSM-900 frequency band has been fabricated and tested. This rectenna composed of a 2 × 1 T-shaped monopole array antenna and an energy processing circuit. In order to reduce the gap between adjacent antenna elements in the array structure, the proposed array antenna uses a ground stub. Compared with other array antennas, the proposed array antenna with the ground stub reduces the size up to 50% without affecting the gain and bandwidth. An antenna prototype is fabricated and experimentally tested. The measured antenna's gain and bandwidth are 3.2 and 152 MHz, respectively, hence showing its suitability for radio-frequency (RF) energy harvesting application. For this to be feasible, the developed array antenna is matched with the rectifier at GSM-900 using a single stub matching network. The measured result demonstrates that the proposed rectifier circuit offers the conversion efficiency of 21.2 and 63.6% for an input power of −20 and 0 dBm, respectively. Finally, the rectifier performance is attested experimentally with the developed array antenna. The rectenna's measured RF-to-dc conversion efficiency was found to be 60% at the far-field distance from the transmitting antenna.