A Dual-Band Circularly Polarized Shared-Aperture Antenna for 1U CubeSat Applications

This communiaition presents a design of a dual-band circularly polarized antenna with structure reuse for one cubic unit (1U) CubeSat applications. It is a challenging to design an antenna with the limited space of a CubeSat platform. To improve the space utilization. an antenna is designed inspired by the concept of structure reuse. A meshed-like-structure is designed, which works as the radiator of a microstrip antenna at UHF band. However, it works as a partial reflective sheet for a Fabry-Perot resonator cavity antenna at C-band. Therefore, a microstrip patch antenna and a Fabry-Perot resonator cavity antenna share only single aperture. A shaped ground is used to decrease the resonance at the lower band. Then. the aperture of the antenna is only 0.3 lambda(0) x 0.3 lambda(0) which makes it vas) . to integrate with a 1U CubeSat. The measurement reveals that the antenna has a c bandwidth of (vertical bar S-11 vertical bar < -10 dB, AR < 3 cut) Ii4 and 1.4%. an isolation higher than 35 and 20 dB, a peak gain of 5.82 and 13.75 dBic at UHF and C-band, respectively. The frequency ratio of these two bands reaches 6.4. The above properties make the proposed antenna suitable fora CubeSat system.

Automated summary

This study presents a design of a dual-band circularly polarized antenna for 1U CubeSat applications, which improves space utilization through the concept of structure reuse and successfully shares a single aperture with a microstrip antenna and a Fabry-Perot resonator cavity antenna. The antenna exhibits excellent performance in the UHF and C-band, making it suitable for CubeSat systems.