Miniaturized Aperture-Coupled Patch Antenna Using Metasurface Inspired DGS

In this paper, we present a new design of a compact aperture-coupled patch antenna for CubeSat applications. By loading a metasurface inspired defected ground structure (DGS) onto the ground plane of the aperture-coupled patch antenna, we achieved a miniaturized antenna that has 4.88 dBi realized gain, 96% efficiency, and 236 MHz bandwidth operating at 5.1 GHz. In addition, a conventional aperture-coupled patch antenna at 5.1 GHz was designed and compared with the miniaturized antenna. While the space covered by the conventional antenna is 1890 mm2, the space covered by the miniature antenna is 622 mm2. This corresponds to a reduction of approximately 67%. As a result, while the value of the conventional antenna was 30% better in terms of gain, it was seen that the bandwidth and efficiency were higher in the miniaturized antenna.