The wideband performance of a bowtie antenna with Γ‐shaped strip feed and tuning stubs is presented. Besides two folded elements connecting the patches of the bowtie dipole for a compact dimension, the Γ‐shaped strip feed structure and the four tuning stubs to effectively improve the impendence matching can be used for bandwidth enhancement. A wideband impedance characteristics of about 58.6% for VSWR ≤ 1.5 ranging from 1.58–2.89 GHz is obtained and the stable peak gain of around 9 dBi, unidirectional radiation patterns and low cross‐polarization over the whole operating band are also achieved. It is very suitable for the recent wireless communication services for the indoor‐base station such as 3G, WiFi, WiMax, Bluetooth, and LTE/2.5 applications, and so on. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:2145–2149, 2013