Rapid Design of Deployable Antennas for CubeSats: A tool to help designers compare and select antenna topologies

A novel methodology for the rapid preliminary design of deployable antennas for CubeSats is proposed in this article. It uses a graphical representation of antenna performance, consisting of a set of plots of different performance metrics against antenna geometry parameters. Coupled electromagnetic and structural design problems are addressed easily, enabling the rapid and direct comparison of different antenna concepts. This approach is demonstrated for a case study at ultrahigh frequency (UHF), comparing the performance of a dipole, a helix, a conical horn, and a conical log spiral (CLS), all based on dual-matrix composite deployable structures. The initial design space of antenna geometries is reduced by two orders of magnitude to a set of constraintsatisfying designs. A graphical user interface implementing the approach is presented, and the accuracy of the method is briefly addressed.