Design and Simulation of a Compact Unidirectional Spiral Antenna with Improved Axial Ratio For Electronic Support Measures Application

This paper presents the design and simulation of a compact spiral antenna for electronic support measures (ESM) applications. The field of ESM necessitates an advanced system for the effective detection, localization, and identification of electromagnetic signals. Antennas at the front end of receivers in ESM systems, play a crucial role in effectively capturing these signals. The inherent wide bandwidth of spiral antennas makes them suitable for ESM applications as they operate across diverse frequency bands without the need for frequency tuning. In addition, the unidirectional and high gain characteristics of spiral antennas substantially improve the system’s capacity to detect and analyze signals with precision, while their compact design ensures ease of integration and versatility. The planar spiral antenna proposed in this paper operates over a wide frequency range of 1GHz to 18GHz, maintains a return loss of less than 10dB throughout the entire frequency range, achieves a maximum gain of 6.236dBi, has a compact balun height of 13.5mm, and has an excellent axial ratio of less than 1.7 at all frequencies.