Development of Quadrifilar Conical-Helix Antenna for WLAN Communication

This paper deals with the development of a quadrifilar conical-helix antenna intended to operate at the frequency of $2.4 \mathbf{G H z}$ in the Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) bands for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) communication. The proposed antenna comprises four copper wires which are wound three times around each other. A 50- $\Omega$ SMA connector is used to excite the antenna and connected to a micro strip feeding network deployed on an FR4 epoxy dielectric substrate. The conical shape of quadrifilar helix antenna is obtained by varying the radius change in each turn. To achieve the desirable performance, optimizations are carried out for the antenna design through simulation. Based on the optimized design, the antenna is realized manually and experimentally characterized. The characterization results show that the antenna prototype can operate at the desirable frequency for WLAN communication with the bandwidth response tailored to the required specification.