A wideband conformal slot antenna for GPS application

A novel wideband conformal slot antenna is proposed for GPS application. Initially a planar antenna with dumbbell shape slot on three sides of patch is designed at a slightly higher frequency and then the planar antenna is transformed to the corresponding cylindrical conformal antenna with the desired radius of curvature. The antenna used in this study employs a dumbbell shape slot on the three sides of patch. To design the wideband antenna, combination of partial ground concept and dumbbell shape slots on patch is employed. The flexible and higher thermal stable substrate like Rogers RT/duroid 5880 with permittivity of 2.2 and thickness of 0.787 is used. Microstrip line feeding is used in the proposed antenna. The proposed conformal antenna exhibits a fractional bandwidth (for the definition of -10 dB) of 75.94% operating from 1056 to 2349 MHz, which is suitable for all GPS band, GLONASS and GALILEO application. The radiation pattern exhibits an omnidirectional pattern and gain of proposed conformal antenna is 2.09 to 4.9 dBi within operating frequency range.