Broadband blade antenna operating in UHF band for ELT application

In this paper, a UHF band blade antenna is presented especially for ELT beacons, used mainly for search and rescue operations supported by the COSAPS SARSAT satellite constellations. The detailed design procedure to achieve broadband behaviour and the parametric analysis of all the geometric parameters are discussed. Proposed antenna is developed on a FR4 substrate and its RF characterization is carried out. It has a 10dB return loss bandwidth of 60% at 406MHz. Proposed antenna is a linearly polarized antenna with gain better than 1.5dBi and cross polarization isolation better than 30dB throughout the band.