Planar Inverted-F Antennas for Low Earth Orbit Satellite Applications

This paper presents a dual band planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) for low earth orbit (LEO) satellite application. The antenna is composed of 2 inverted-F elements which operating in different frequency bands. To ensure the antenna works properly, the combination of antenna and satellite shell was fabricated and measured. Measurement results indicate that the proposed antenna works well at 2.099 GHz with a bandwidth of 116 MHz and 2.28 GHz with a bandwidth of 158 MHz while the radiation pattern shows a unidirectional property and the total efficiency is higher than 90%. In addition, the proposed antenna is compact and low profile which makes it very suitable for satellite communication system.