Steerable Antenna Array For UAV Applications

Abstract

An antenna array system design, demonstrating the possible application on an unmanned aerial vehicle platform using a full wave electromagnetic simulation software is presented. Linear array of patches in E plane and H plane are designed consisting of 4 elements with a beam steering ability of ±40 degree from the broadside direction with a peak gain of 12.23dB. Further an arrangement illustrating four such linear arrays, that can switch between each other to cover the entire azimuth scanning is shown. After a series of modified patch antenna designs with an attempt to increase the gain, an inset fed microstrip patch antenna is chosen as a basic radiating element considering its design simplicity and efficient radiation characteristics owing to the limited dimension available on a UAV platform. Gain of a single element inset fed patch antenna is found to be 7.2 dB resonating at 5.6GHz with 10 dB bandwidth range of 190MHz.The dimension of a single patch is 0.3λ0×0.28λ0×0.02λ0 . Also a single element patch antenna is fabricated using milling machine and analyzed using a vector network analyzer.