Cavity-Backed Archimedean Spiral Antenna with Conical Perturbations for 3U CubeSat Applications [Education Corner]

This article reports the development of a CubeSat antenna for the 2017 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) Student Design Contest by an interdisciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate students from the Electrical and Aerospace Engineering Departments of the University of Alabama. First, as satellites require lineof-sight (LOS) communication with the ground station, a link scenario was created to determine the points of visibility in the CubeSat's orbit. Then, link and power budgets were calculated to determine the specifications for an antenna that is suitable for 3U Cube-Sat applications in the X band (8 GHz) and Ku band (11.2 GHz). To meet the requirements, a cavity-backed Archimedean spiral antenna (ASA) with quadruple conical perturbations (QCPs) was designed and fabricated.