On the Design of a Circularly Polarized Microstrip Antenna Array for CubeSat in the Ka-Band

This paper describes the preliminary phases of the design of a planar antenna array to be mounted on a face of a CubeSat operating in the Ka-frequency band. In order to compensate the high attenuation of the millimeter-waves, the antenna is required to be circularly polarized, and the final array is composed of subarrays of sequentially rotated square microstrip patches with truncated corners. In particular, two candidate geometries are presented for the subarray, which improve a prototype previously realized at the University of Trieste. Then, the performances of three possible configurations for the final array are evaluated.