This document describes research on improving the performance of rectangular microstrip antennas. Several antenna designs are proposed and tested, including adding dual wide slits to the patch, adding electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structures to the ground plane, and stacking multiple patches. Test results show that adding EBG structures and using a stacking technique can significantly increase the bandwidth and gain of the antennas. The stacked rectangular microstrip antenna with a swastika EBG structure achieved the highest overall bandwidth of 118.9% and a gain increase of 15.25dB.