A compact dual band H-shape reactive impedance surface (H-RIS) metamaterial loaded Koch fractal antenna is presented in this paper. The array of H-shape unit cell resonators is used to form reactive impedance surface. Resonance occurred at 3.4 and 5.35 GHz frequency bands. These frequency bands are feasible to use at C- and S-bands synthetic aperture radar (SAR) applications. The geometry of proposed antenna is designed with low-cost substrate FR-4. Radiation patterns are measured and compared with the simulation results for testing the overall performance of the newly designed antenna. The measured results are well matched with simulation one. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.