To meet the demand for compact handheld communication devices, need of internal antennas have grown significantly. size of the antenna is a major factor that limits device miniaturization. moreover, new wireless applications requiring operation in more than one frequency band are emerging. with the advancement in communication technology, several applications like gsm, umts, dcs, imt, wlan, bluetooth, wimax and lte have developed. the need of antennas having functionality over gps band along with the communication band is also felt as gps has no return link. a return link enables positional information derived from gps to be communicated to a remote location. since little work has been done on the compact pifa with high gain which incorporates gps application with return link like wimax, a novel compact linearly polarized planar inverted-f antenna (pifa) is proposed. the proposed structure is a compact dual-band pifa in conjunction with an inverted l-shaped parasitic and reduced ground-plane structure, working in the gps l1 (1565–1585 mhz) and wimax band (3300–3800 mhz). the proposed antenna structure is realized by a metal sheet of 0.2 mm thickness, which is cut into branches of suitable dimensions and properly bent. the driven inverted f-shaped element and a parasitic inverted l-shaped element, aligned face to face over the finite ground plane forming the radiating structure. suitable modification is done in the ground plane by reducing the length of ground plane from the left of the probe by 1 mm to achieve the required bandwidth, keeping the rest of the edges of ground plane and radiating element are overlapped. the antenna meets the strict space requirements of the portable devices and the final design fits a volume of 100 × 24 × 9.7 mm3 (l × w × h). the proposed design is slim, compact and can be fabricated via simple cutting and bending of copper sheet. the linearly polarized antenna exhibits good impedance matching performance. the radiating element presents a wide beam radiation pattern and, at the same time, a relatively high gain because of the low losses deriving from the absence of a dielectric layer under the radiating driven and parasitic plates. also carrier-to-noise ratio (cnr) calculated for three different satellite locations i.e., 50, 500, and 900 elevation are 47.58 db/hz, 50.49 db/hz, and 45.86 db/hz respectively at the centre frequency (1575 mhz) of gps l1 band, which is well within the maximum allowable limit (50.5 db/hz) at room temperature.