In this paper, a novel tunable tri-band antenna
is presented for concurrent, multi-band, single chain radio
receivers. The antenna is manufactured on a 50×100 mm FR4
printed circuit board (PCB), and is able to provide three concurrent,
independently tunable operating bands covering a frequency
range from 600 MHz to 2.7 GHz. The antenna performance
is investigated for both numerical and experimental methods
when using, first, varactor diodes and, second, digitally tunable
capacitors (DTCs) to tune frequencies, which shows the antenna
gain can be improved by up to 2.6 dBi by using DTCs. A
hardware-in-the-loop test-bed provides a system level evaluation
of the proposed antenna in a direct RF digitized, concurrent,
tri-band radio receiver. By measuring the receiver’s error vector
magnitude, we demonstrate sufficient isolation between concurrent
bands achieving 30 MHz of aggregated bandwidth as well
as strong resilience to adjacent blockers next to each band. The
data reported in this article are available from the ORDA digital
repository (https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.5346295)
