CYLINDRICAL: an effective CAD package for designing probe-fed rectangular microstrip antennas conformed onto cylindrical structures

This paper presents a computer-aided design tool named CYLINDRICAL. The algorithm utilizes the cavity model to design and analyze linearly and circularly polarized probe-fed rectangular microstrip antennas conformed onto cylindrical structures. A brief description of the program is given. CYLINDRICAL was used to design a circularly polarized antenna to operate in the L1 band of GPS. Validation was further done with the Ansoft HFSS package. It was shown that the antenna dimensions given by the design algorithm of CYLINDRICAL needed to be only slightly changed in order to obtain an optimized circularly polarized radiator according to the HFSS software. The tool is also very suitable for teaching graduate courses on microstrip antennas.