Characterisation of Thin Glass-Fibre Substrates for Deployable SAR Antennas

This paper investigates the electrical characteristics of a thin glass-fibre membrane to be employed as a support and dielectric substrate for a new kind of deployable antenna mechan-ical structure designed for space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar sensors on nano-satellite platforms. The approach outlined in this paper relies on cost-effective test fixtures built from material samples originally designed for mechanical testing. A simple Time Domain Reflectometry / Transmissometry (TDR/T) procedure enables the extraction of the material's complex permittivity.