Easy-to-deploy LC-loaded dipole and monopole antennas for cubesat

This paper proposes a new approach to reduce weight and complexity of VHF/UHF cubesat antennas by utilizing a dual band antenna, rather than standard two-antenna system routinely implemented in cubesats. Three systems are compared: A standard system with separate transmit/receive dipoles, a dual-band dipole for both transmit and receive and a dual-band monopole, which uses the body of 1U cubesat (10 × 10 × 10cm) as a “groundplane”. Additionally it is demonstrated that with appropriate feed the dipole might be used in monopole configuration in case of deployment system malfunction.