Design of High-Isolation Yagi—Uda Antennas for Military Full-Duplex Radios at 300 MHz

Military full-duplex radios enable multiple novel applications including simultaneous jamming and reconnaissance at the same frequency band. However, the high power levels typical to military radios induce very demanding requirements for antenna isolation, analog RF cancellation and digital baseband processing to enable receiver operation with high dynamic range. This paper presents a proposed design of a novel dual Yagi—Uda antenna system for simultaneous jamming and reconnaissance with simulated isolation level of over 80 dB, 60 dB and 50 dB for bandwidths of 1 MHz, 5 MHz and 15 MHz, respectively, targeting the 300 MHz center frequency within the NATO Band I. The high isolation is obtained by placing a decoupling element between two closely placed collinear Yagi—Uda antennas for improving the isolation over 50 dB. The interception performance and jamming effectiveness of the whole transceiver system are studied without and with the decoupling element that yields significant improvement in interception range and increase in maximum supported jamming power. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-200RSY — the ICMCIS, held in Skopje, North Macedonia, 16–17 May 2023.