Small planar antennas are becoming increasingly popular in personal wireless communication systems since these antennas offer advantages such as small size,light weight, robust construction, ease of integration into mobile handsets, reasonable radiation efficiency and gain. A new small microstrip antenna operating at 880MHz is designed using the Finite difference time domain technique incorporating the perfectly matched-layer formulation. Shorting pins are used to achieve the reduction in size.The size of this patch antenna is approximately four times less than that of the regular half wavelength patch antenna. An antenna array made of the new patch antennas is used ina multiple antenna system to reliably separate different users on the same channel using linearbeam steering techniques with the ultimate goal of increasing the channel capacity.Prototypes of the proposed dual shorted-pin-patch antenna are fabricated and measurements of their return loss compare well with the computational results.
