Due to the advantage of mobility, there are many applications in wireless local area networks (WLAN) at 2.4 GHz. For these applications, multipath effects are the common reception problems in dynamic, complex electromagnetic environments. In order to reduce signal fading caused by multipath effects, diversity techniques are therefore applied to the antenna system at the receiving site. For this reason, a modified printed strip monopole antenna having a polarization diversity with a hybrid feed system is proposed. From experimental results, it is shown that the impedance bandwidth for the proposed antenna can reach over 16% and the antenna length is only 17 mm (/spl sim/0.14/spl lambda//sub 0/, where /spl lambda//sub 0/, is the free-space wavelength). Owing to its compactness in antenna length, the proposed antenna can be integrated into a restricted area of 30 mm/spl times/50 mm as a part of a WLAN PCMCIA card.