Stacked Transparent Meshed Patch Antenna for CubeSats

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and measurement results of an optically transparent stacked meshed patch antenna with proximity-fed excitation for CubeSat applications. The proposed antenna achieved significant bandwidth enhancement through a multilayer meshed patch configuration. The fabricated prototype demonstrated promising performance, including an impedance bandwidth of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{6. 5 \%}$</tex> and a broadside radiation pattern with 5.4 dBi gain at 2.52 GHz and cross-polarization levels below −20 dBc. A comparison of simulated and measured results confirmed the effectiveness of the design, highlighting potential applications in space-based systems requiring optically transparent antennas.