Design and Implementation of Wideband Patch Array Antenna for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communication

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a wideband patch array antenna for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication. An antenna that has high gain and wide bandwidth is required to meet the UAV communication requirements. It is known that a patch antenna has various weaknesses, including relatively narrow bandwidth. Therefore, the proximity coupling technique is used to attain a wide bandwidth response, whereby this method is implemented by using two layers of dielectric substrate. Technically the feeding line is positioned on the top side of first layer with the groundplane at the bottom side of first layer, while the patch is located on the top side of second layer. The effort to increase the gain is by using an array configuration with a serial feeding line technique of an out-of-line feed type. The configuration of antenna array is optimized to achieve the required gain. The proposed array antenna consists of 2 × 8 patches excited by a proximity coupling technique and designed on FR-4 Epoxy dielectric substrate with a thickness of 1.6 mm. The final design which takes the dimensions of 224 mm × 60.2 mm has the value of reflection coefficient (S
11
) less than –10 dB with the gain of more than 10 dBi at the frequency of 5.375 GHz and the bandwidth response of more than 300 MHz.