This paper presents a new design of an elliptical disc monopole antenna for ultra wideband (UWB) applications. The antenna is fed by a 50 Ω microstrip line and printed on a dielectric FR4 substrate of permittivity ε _r  = 4.7 and height h = 1.6 mm. The optimization on the planar elliptical disc monopole has been presented to accomplish an ultra wide 10 dB return loss bandwidth. The design includes a half-modified circular ground plane with two short I-shaped sleeves in the middle to enhance the S-parameter characteristics across the whole UWB frequency band. Furthermore, compared to a simple rectangular shaped ground plane, the proposed design enhances the bandwidth and improves input return loss. The obtained results confirm that the proposed antenna achieves greater than 90 % radiation efficiency, better than 10 dB return loss, and 0.1 ns group delay in the frequency range of 3.1–12 GHz. The parameters, which affect the performance of the antenna with respect to frequency domain and time domain characteristics, are investigated also. In addition, the proposed antenna is fabricated and the simulation results are compared to the measurement results to prove the superiority of the antenna.