Design and Development of Microstrip Patch Antenna Array for Small Satellite

The paper presents the circular microstrip antenna with an additional small circular patch excited by a single feed for achieving circular polarization (CP) and afterwards 2x2 sequentially rotated array antenna. In order to improve circular polarization bandwidth, sequential rotation techniques using the proposed microstrip antenna were investigated. This paper proposes a left-handed circularly polarized (LHCP) 2×2 array antenna using sequential phase rotation power dividers at 5.8 GHz. This paper primarily focuses on the compact, low-cost design of a circularly polarized antenna to meet the application requirements of next-generation small satellites. The final design has the left-handed circularly polarized with the axial ratio level below 1.5 dB for the whole bandwidth from 5.5 GHz to 6.1 GHz. The proposed antenna is made up of square flame retardant 4 (FR4) substrate. The final design size is of 56 mm x 45 mm, the measured realized gain is more than 7.7 dBi and 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth is 11%. The 10-dB impedance bandwidth of the antenna is better than 10%. Due to compact design, this proposed antenna can be easily mounted on the CubeSat structure as it combines efficient performance with a low profile.