A Wideband Stacked Patch-Patch Antenna with Hybrid Perturbations for Circular Polarization

This paper presents a wideband circularly polarized antenna for small satellites to be used with NASA Near-Earth Networks (NEN). This single-fed stacked antenna utilizes the electromagnetic coupling concept and is usable with a duplex transceiver. The circularly-polarized antenna employs hybrid perturbations on stacked patches and covers NASA NEN's both uplink and downlink frequencies, thus replacing the conventional requirement of two separate antennas. It provides a notable wide axial ratio (AR) < 3 dB bandwidth of 1.16 GHz from 7.02 GHz to 8.18 GHz (15.3%). The optimized patch dimensions provide 34.6% VSWR ~ 2 bandwidth from 6,525 MHz to 9,253 MHz. The overall antenna size is 17 mm × 17 mm × 6.6 mm, and has a peak gain of 7.9 dBi. This proposed antenna will overcome solar cell space constraint on smallsat's outer wall by saving at least 50% area required by the conventional two-antenna method.