Theincrease in the number of cellular operating bands and theever-increasing criteria antenna size reduction has pushed the need touse switchable antenna structures. Further, the presence of a handin the close vicinity of the antenna causes deterioration inperformance. The authors present a switchable antenna technique, evaluate theeffect of the human hand on it and discuss anovel method to compensate for the mismatch. A penta-band switchableplanar inverted-F antenna covering 824–960 and 1710–2170 MHz has been usedin this study. The presence of the hand was observedto cause 2.0–6.0 dB loss in efficiency for the low band.Using the proposed extra-ground antenna switching method and the dynamicantenna matching, technique the total efficiency of the antenna canbe improved by 0.5–2.5 dB compared to the mismatched case