A Multiband, Mutipolarization Shared-Aperture Antenna: Design and evaluation

A compact, shared-aperture antenna (SAA) configuration consisting of various planar antennas embedded into a single footprint is presented in this article. An L-probefed, suspended-plate, horizontally polarized antenna operating in an 900-MHz band; an aperture-coupled, vertically polarized, microstrip antenna operating at 4.2-GHz; a 2 × 2 microstrip patch array operating at the X band; a low-side-lobe level (SLL), corporate-fed, 8 × 4 microstrip planar array for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in the X band; and a printed, single-arm, circularly polarized, tilted-beam spiral antenna operating at the C band are integrated into a single aperture for simultaneous operation. This antenna system could find potential application in many airborne and unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) technologies. While the design of these antennas is not that critical, their optimal placement in a compact configuration for simultaneous operation with minimal interference poses a significant challenge to the designer. The placement optimization was arrived at based on extensive numerical fullwave optimizations.