Meander line technique for size reduction of quadrifilar helix antenna

Miniaturization of Compact Quadrifilar Helix Antennas for Telemetry, Tracking and Command Applications

“…Other key parameters impacting QHA design and performances are the diameter d g of the ground plane and the wire radius for wire-supported QHA (or the strip width for printed QHA). Wire-supported QHA designs were reported in [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] while printed QHA were studied in [10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…In the past years, the shapes of constitutive wires in CQHAs were described by sinusoidal [6,12,15], periodic triangular [20], periodic trapezoidal [20], rectangular [12,21], meandered [13,14], prefractal [22], non-linear functions [23] and more recently, by the combination of fractal and sine functions [24] (a review of the patents on CQHAs can be found in [25]). The axial height of the QHA can be also reduced by modifying the geometry/the shape at the center of the helical section [7,8].…”

Helical Antennas in Satellite Radio Channel

“…Printed QHAs, convenient for high frequency applications, are manufactured using the dielectric substrate (Chew et al, 2002;Hanane et al, 2007) while wire QHA-s can be implemented on cylindrical, conical, square and spherical dielectric mechanical supports (Casey & Bansal, 2002;Hui et al, 2001). The size reduction of quadrifilar helical antennas can be achieved with geometrical reduction techniques such as sinusoidal (Fonseca et al, 2009;Takacs et al, 2010), rectangular (Ibambe et al, 2007), meander line (Chew et al, 2002) and other techniques (Letestu et al, 2006). Radiation pattern of fractional turn resonant QHA is cardioid-shaped and circularly polarized with wide beamwitdh, but by extending the fractional-turn QHA to an integral number of turns shaped-conical radiation pattern can be obtained for many applications in spacecraft communications (Kilgus, 1975).…”

Compact printed quadrifilar helix antennas for stratospheric balloons telemetry

“…In the literature, meander lines [2,3] and pre-fractal (space-filling) curves [4] were applied to the arms of helix antennas in order to reduce its length. Compact PQH antennas with meander lines have been reported in [3] but the performances of the proposed antennas in term of the axial ratio (which are of crucial importance in our application) are not compared with those of conventional PQH antennas.…”