Conformal Triangular Slotted Antenna for Rocket Sounding Application

An antenna on the sounding rocket is necessary, so it can receive and transmit signals to the ground station. This paper presents the design and simulation of a conformal triangular slotted antenna for sounding rocket application. The proposed antenna is intended to work at the frequencies of 0.91 GHz and 2.45 GHz for radio telemetry and 1.575 GHz for Global Positioning System (GPS) channel L1. It is designed on a 0.254 mm thick Rogers/Duroid 5880 dielectric substrate with a relative permittivity of 2.2 and dimensions of 228.6 mm × 304.8 mm. The antenna consists of a 1 ×2 array for telemetry and a single element for GPS L1. The antenna is excited with proximity coupling which is fed to coaxial cable from below the substrate. The result shows that the proposed antenna can work at the frequencies of 0.91 GHz, 1.575 GHz, and 2.45 GHz with the reflection coefficient values maintained less than -10 dB. These three frequencies have fractional bandwidths of 0.85%, 1.86%, and 1.3%, respectively. The 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth for GPS L1 antenna achieves 80 MHz. Furthermore, the radiation patterns are omnidirectional with the gains at these frequencies are 2.78 dBi, -3.19 dBi, and 3.02 dBi, respectively.