A Wideband 5G CubeSat Patch Antenna

This article presents a wideband microstrip patch antenna for Ka-band CubeSat applications. The proposed antenna mainly consists of a square patch antenna printed on a grounded FR4 slab which is used as a building block. Moreover, a parasitic element and slots are added to enhance the impedance bandwidth and improve the gain, respectively. To validate the simulation results, a prototype patch antenna was fabricated and tested inside an anechoic chamber. A good agreement between the simulated and measured results is achieved. The performance of the proposed antenna is compared to the related existing antenna designs. The experimental results confirm that our proposed antenna achieves a wide −10 dB impedance bandwidth of about 20.2% (25.5–31.2 GHz), a small reflection coefficient of −45 dB, high efficiency of 82%, and a measured peak realized gain of 6.9 dB at 28 GHz.