Microstrip antennas are attractive for many applications because of their compact size, low profile, and light weight. Recently, the demand for the miniaturization of the personal communication equipment has been increasing along with the proliferation of personal communication systems. Thus, the development of small antenna has been highly demanded. In this paper, a new technique to reduce the overall dimension of a microstrip antenna with a locally non-homogeneous substrate configuration is proposed. The miniaturized microstrip antenna for a repeater system in a mobile communication cellular band(824~894 MHz) is designed with the proposed technique, and commercialized with low cost, light weight, and small size. Comparison between simulations, based on Agilent Technologies HFSS software, and measurements are provided. The proposed method will be more attractive for a light-weight, small-size, and low-cost microstrip array design. This paper also presents the bandwidth improvement technique for under-coupled microstrip patch antenna with a tuning stub.