Dielectric Superstrate Structures for Gain Enhancement of a Patch Antenna in the Ku-band

Low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites are emerging as an alternate technology to facilitate seamless internet connectivity in automotive applications and overcome the current limitations of terrestrial cellular networks. However LEO satellite connectivity demands the use of high gain antenna arrays which due to a large size is a challenge to integrate into the roof of a car. A compact design is thus essential which can be achieved using individual antenna elements with higher gain per unit area. In this paper a novel low-profile and compact single antenna element with dielectric ring as a replacement of a dielectric slab superstrate is presented. Despite a small additional volume due to the superstrate, it offers a gain enhancement of 3 dB over a conventional patch antenna. A 3 dB improvement in gain means the total number of antenna elements can be reduced by half resulting in a reduced overall size. With a footprint of $0.25\lambda _0^2$ and height of 0.5λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf> where λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf> corresponds to the free-space wavelength, this design is promising for implementation in an array configuration owing to reduction in material, weight and cost.