A Wideband Circularly Polarized Stacked Antenna with Corner Perturbations for CubeSats

This paper presents a single-feed circularly polarized wideband printed antenna for small satellites, which can be used with NASA Near-Earth Networks (NEN) for both uplink and downlink communications. This electromagnetically coupled stacked antenna is capable of working with a duplex transceiver and has the advantage of not requiring two different antennas for transmitting and receiving. It shows a significantly wide axial ratio (AR) <; 3dB bandwidth of 1.24 GHz from 7.02 GHz to 8.26 GHz (16.23%). An optimized combination of stacked patches provides a 27% S
₁₁
<; -10 dB bandwidth. This wideband covers the NASA NEN's X-band uplink and downlink frequencies. The overall antenna size for a single element is 17 mm × 17 mm × 6.5 mm, which can provide a peak gain of 8 dBi. This antenna can save up to at least 50% area required by the conventional two-antenna solution for uplink and downlink, which is critical for CubeSat applications.