Microstrip antennas (or patch antennas) are extremely important in modern electrical engineering for the simple fact that they can directly be printed to a circuit board. This makes them necessary for things like cellular antennas for GPS, communication with cell towers and bluetooth/WiFi. Patch antennas are notoriously narrowband, especially those with a rectangular shape (patch antennas can have a wide variety of shapes). Patch antennas can be configured as single antennas or in an array. The excitation is usually fed by a microstrip line which usually has a characteristic impedance of 50 ohms.

One of the most common analysis methods for analyzing microstrip antennas is the transmission line model. It is important to note that the microstrip transmission line does not support TEM mode, unlike the coaxial cable which has radial symmetry. For the microstrip line, quasi-TEM is supported. For this mode, there is a field component along the direction of propagation, although it is small. For the purposes of the model, this can be ignored and the TEM mode which has no field component in the direction of propagation can be used. This reduces the model to:

Where the effective dielectric constant can be approximated as:

The width of the strip must be greater than the height of the substrate. It is important to note that the dielectric constant is not constant for frequency. As a consequence, the above approximation is only valid for low frequencies of microwave.

Another note for the transmission line model is that the effective length differs from the physical length of the patch. The effective length is longer by 2ΔL due to fringing effects. ΔL can be expressed as a function of the effective dielectric constant.