An Optically Transparent Meshed Patch Antenna With Enhanced Bandwidth for CubeSat Applications

In this paper, we propose a new transparent stacked meshed patch antenna resonating at 2.5 GHz that offers wide impedance bandwidth and high efficiency along with light-weight and high integrability with CubeSat solar cells. The bandwidth improvement comes from two meshed square patches that are placed on top of each other and have two close resonance frequencies. The first design consists of two Fused Silica glass substrates with an overall height of 5 mm in which the first layer acts as both antenna's substrate and solar cell cover glass. The antenna demonstrates an impedance bandwidth of 6.1%, peak gain of 6.9 dBi, and efficiency higher than 90%. The results were a motivation for further exploration of the performance of the stacked antenna with a sacrificial polymer material between two patches resulting in a lightweight antenna. The second antenna is lighter by 30% at the expense of lower efficiency. Further weight reduction is applied by partially removing the sacrificial polymer. All the proposed antennas have transparency higher than 90%. Thus, they can be placed directly on top of the solar cells without a significant effect on the solar cell's efficiency.