Only-Metal Ultra-Small Circular Slot Antenna for 3U CubeSats

In this research work, an only metal small antenna is constructed for 3U CubeSats. The proposed antenna structure presents very small size and ultra-lightweight with high peak gain for CubeSat communications. The proposed small antenna is configured and optimized at Ku-Band using ANSYS HFSS and Quasi Newtonian Method. In addition to that, this study introduces the use of a 3U CubeSat top face as reflector for increasing the antenna gain and so targeted Satellite orbits using this antenna configuration. The achieved results show that this small size metallic antenna configuration presents good impedance matching, ultra-wide band of 2.78 GHz (-10 dB BW of almost 93%) and a peak gain of about 8.4 dBi at Ku-Band (13.4 GHz). These performances make proposed metallic slot antenna very suitable for uplink and downlink CubeSat transmissions at Ku-band.