Abstract
This article presents a compact wideband high gain patch antenna for CubeSat. The proposed metal-only antenna mainly consists of an upper patch, a folded ramp-shaped patch and shoring pins connecting the antenna with the ground plane. By adjusting the lengths and widths of two arms of the upper F-shaped patch, a second resonant frequency is generated, and hence, the −10 dB bandwidth is increased. Moreover, the effect of arms’ lengths and widths on reflection coefficients, operating frequency and bandwidth is presented. To validate the design and the simulation results, a prototype metal-only patch antenna was fabricated and tested in a Chamber. A good agreement between the simulated and measured results is achieved. The measured results show that the fabricated prototype achieves a −10 dB bandwidth of 44.9% (1.6–2.7 GHz), a small reflection coefficient of −24.4 dB and a high efficiency, i.e., 85% at 2.45 GHz. The radiation performance of the proposed antenna is measured, showing a peak realized gain of 8.5 dBi with cross polarization level less than −20 dB at 2.45 GHz and a 3 dB gain bandwidth of 61.22%.
Highlights
Cube Satellites (CubeSats) are a class of tiny satellites that have become popular space programs and have opened the door for universities and small companies to gain experience in space technology using cost-effective missions [1]
We propose a wideband F-shaped patch antenna for CubeSats communications with an operating frequency of 2.45 GHz
We see that the slot length L2 has no effect on the resonant frequency of the proposed antenna
Summary
Cube Satellites (CubeSats) are a class of tiny satellites that have become popular space programs and have opened the door for universities and small companies to gain experience in space technology using cost-effective missions [1]. Its main limitation is its narrow −10 dB bandwidth, i.e., 1.67%, and a low gain, 5.3 dBi. the authors of [9] proposed a meshed patch antenna that operates at 2.45 GHz for small satellites. The U-slotted patch antenna was printed on FR4 substrate and was placed 8 mm above the ground plane As a result, both air and FR4 dielectric were used as substrate material, achieving an impedance bandwidth of 30% at 2.4 GHz. A circular microstrip patch loaded with shorting pins operating at X-band can be found in [17]. The performance of the proposed antenna is compared with some existing proposed patch antennas for CubeSat in terms of size, bandwidth and gain
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