Design of Combined Printed Helical Spiral Antenna and Helical Inverted-F Antenna for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Application

The design and implementation of printed helical spiral antenna (PHSA) and helical printed inverted-F antenna (IFA) are presented for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with global positioning system (GPS) L1 band (1.57 GHz) and telemetry communication frequency band (2.33 GHz) applications. The proposed antenna is miniaturized by co-winding the radiation elements on the same ceramic rod, surface covering by dielectric sealant, inserting a high permittivity dielectric load into the helical structure, turning and meandering the radiation element of PHSA into a spiral parallelogram structure. The PHSA and helical IFA antenna radiation elements are manufactured by silver pasted on the same hollow ceramic cylinder with a diameter of 12 mm and a height of 24.7 mm. The experimental and simulation results show that the proposed PHSA and IFA can achieve the gain of 0.05dB and 1.97 dB respectively and be suitable for GPS L1 band and telemetry communication frequency band (2.33 GHz) applications separately.