The frequency bandwidth of microstrip patch antennas can be increased using both of U-slot and proximity feeding. Although some design rules have been already explained for the probe-fed U-slot antenna the proximity coupling causes to consider a lot of parameters for design procedure; consequently, to deal with all of them seems confusing. In this paper after investigating the effect of various parameters on the multiple resonant frequencies of the antenna and recognizing the most effective

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... ors, some guidelines to design a proximity coupled U-slot microstrip antenna are proposed. In addition, an antenna element with 16% impedance bandwidth is designed at center frequency of 16.7GHz, and its broadband impedance and radiation characteristics are vastly considered. Also, 1×2 and 2×2 arrays of the antenna element are designed to use as subarrays for designing large arrays. The measurement results of return loss and radiation pattern, show good agreement with simulation results.