Gain enhanced circularly polarized antenna integrated with artificial magnetic conductor for S-band pico-satellites

Abstract

A circularly polarized (CP) antenna integrated with an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) plane is presented. The AMC plane is aimed at enhancing the gain of the CP antenna, besides reduced back‐radiation, and avoiding radiation toward other high‐frequency components on the CubeSat. It consists of a 3 × 3 array of diamond‐shaped unit cells placed behind the complementary dipole‐based antenna. To enable deployability and compact deployment size, the AMC structure is designed on a thin flexible Kapton film as substrate, whereas its metallic components are formed using Nickel conductive paint. Meanwhile, the CP antenna is designed on a thin Rogers RO4003C substrate and located on top of the AMC plane at a 20 mm distance. The combined structure operates at 2.4 GHz with satisfactory reflection and radiation performance. It is sized at 99 mm × 99 mm × 21.485 mm3, with 450 MHz (18%) of 10 dB impedance bandwidth and 250 MHz (10%) of 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth. The AMC plane also improved its gain from 3.05 dBi up to 5.35 dBi.

A high gain dual circularly polarized X‐band antenna for CubeSat applications

“…By using FSS superstrate, a high gain wideband patch antenna for millimeter wave applications is proposed in Asaadi et al 12 In Gupta et al, 13 an array of nonuniform PPs are used on superstrate to achieve high gain. To enhance the gain of CP antenna, and to reduce to back radiation, AMC is used in Lokman et al 14 In Ta et al, 15 to improve both the gain and bandwidth, a single fed slot patch antenna loaded with metasurface is presented for CubeSat applications.…”