Proceedings of the 40th European Microwave Conference

A Compact Broadband Omnidirectional Vertically Polarized VHF Antenna For Aircraft

T.J. Yuan #1 , L.Y. Zhou #2 ,H.H. Ouslimani #3 , A. Priou #4 ,P. Besnard 5 , G. Collignon 6 , A. Marteau 7
University Paris-Ouest Nanterre-La Defense LEME 50 rue de S` evres, 92410 Ville dAvray, France
1 2

tangjie.yuan@u-paris10.fr luyang.zhou@u-paris10.fr

INEO Defense, RouteMilitaire Nord- ZA Louis Br eguet CS 80526, 78140 Velizy Villacoublay, France
6 7

gerard.collignon@ineo-gdfsuez.com aurelien.marteau@ineo-gdfsuez.com

Abstract A very efcient miniaturized VHF antenna with dimensions of 0.150 0.150 etched on 0.787 mm and r =4.4 dielectric FR-4 substrate is presented. It is inspired from the Sarabandi and co-authors works. The antenna is vertically polarized and behaves like a vertical dipole antenna used for Civil Aviation. It is composed by a great number of folded slots arranged in circular loop geometry and has a total length of a half-wave. The numerical simulations show a resonance frequency in the desired VHF frequency range. Using inductive and capacitive loading (LC circuit) impedance, the bandwidth can be signicantly increased. All results are to be achieved with CST simulator.

are investigated. The numerical simulations show a good behavior of the proposed antenna. II. A NTENNA T HEORY A vertical 0 /2 dipole antenna displays an omnidirectional pattern in the horizontal plane. Using equivalence theorem, a vertical dipole is interchangeable with a magnetic loop on the horizontal plane as it is shown on (Fig. 1). The length of the dipole remains the same on the horizontal plane.

I. I NTRODUCTION The design of antennas used for aircraft differs from other applications. The monopole and its variants are the most commonly used vertically polarized VHF aircraft antennas [1]. At VHF frequency band, the total length of the radiating element is too long. Recent studies [2],[3] reported a signicant progress in the UHF and VHF bands. In [1], VHF microstrip patch antenna was designed to operate in the range of 127 MHz to 172 MHz with a bandwidth of 45 MHz (30 %) but this antenna required large sizes (LWH) of 762 762 166 mm3 . In [2], UHF slot loop antenna was designed in the range of 440 MHz to 460 MHz with a bandwidth of 0.7% MHz with 0.120 0.120 lateral sizes with a global height of 6.8 mm or 13.2 mm. This new approach of antenna miniaturization [3] is studied. The main inconvenient of this miniaturization is the achieved narrow-band (high resonant coefcient Q). In this paper a novel compact broadband, over a large impedance bandwidth VHF antenna is presented with omnidirectional vertically polarized radiation. The structure is a type of cavity-backed omnidirectional antenna inspired by the topology rstly proposed by K. Sarabandi and co-authors [4]. It consisted of a vertical dipole with a number of folded half-wave slot antennas arranged in circular loop geometry to create a very efcient miniaturized antenna. The optimized dimensions are about 0.150 0.150 , on a substrate having FR-4 r =4.4 with a height less than 0.0050 . The radiation pattern, the input impedance and the bandwidth characteristics

Fig. 1.

Geometry of magnetic annular folded-slot antenna

With the use of the equivalence principle, the slot apertures are covered by perfect electric conductors and the electric eld in the apertures are represented by equivalent magnetic currents [1]. To realize effectively the magnetic dipole antenna, rstly a constant current distribution around the circular slot must be assured to achieve omnidirectional radiation in the horizontal plane. Secondly, the circumference of the annular slot antenna is classically equal to one half-wavelength g /2 =2R2, where g is the guided wavelength in the slot-line (Fig. 11(a)). The use of a slot width (R1 - R2) is efcient to tune the matching impedance. Such an antenna has its rst resonance when the overall length of the antenna is approximately equal to one half wavelengths (g /2). However the total height of the antenna is reduced, the horizontal size is also too large for the practical

978-2-87487-016-3 2010 EuMA

1480

28-30 September 2010, Paris, France

application. Various methods such as inductive or capacitive loading can be used to reduce the size of such antenna, [5][9]. As mentioned before, we used one technique which is based on loading a slot antenna with appropriate inductive loads at its terminations to achieve resonance. (Fig. 11(b)) depicts an intermediate antenna design, shown to illustrate the procedure of miniaturization, herein, the antenna is composed of an annular slot with two straight slot sections connected to two balanced slots at its ends. If, by using an appropriate boundary condition, the magnetic current density at any arbitrary point along the length of a modied slot antenna can be maintained the same as in the g /2 slot antenna, [6] then it is possible to design a smaller slot antenna. In practice, the length of balanced slot (Fig. 11) is approximately a quarter wavelength.

(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig. 3. Principle of the miniaturized antenna, (a) original slot loop antenna, (b) topology of the slot folder miniaturized antenna and (c) zoom of the slot loop antenna Example of an image with acceptable resolution

(a)

dielectric constant of r =3.38, the surface and the bottom of cylinder-shaped cavity is metalized [7],[8],[9]. An annular slot of radius Rinter is cut on a metallic plane above the substrate, with four element resonance folded-slot spirals. Each element in Fig.3 (c) is designed to be a half wavelength slot antenna, and is fed by CPW lines. As a result, the width and the gap of the CPW lines were modied at w=0.5mm and gap = 2.4mm to 185 ohm.

Fig. 4.

Side view of structure slot antenna

(b) Fig. 2. Model of an annular slot antenna (a) half-wave annular slot antenna and (b) two series inductive terminations by radiating slot (R1>R2>R3>R4)

As mentioned before, the further miniaturization is obtained by winding the balanced slot-line into a compact spiral slot as seen in Fig.3, in this case, the antennas electrical length from one termination of one balanced spiral to the termination of the other balanced spiral is approximately half a wavelength long. These inductive loads for each spiral can be thought of as a short circuited transmission line, the main radiating part of the antenna is annular slot section. In this way, a more compact conguration can be achieved. III. A NTENNA C ONFIGURATION A ND R ESULTS The geometry of the proposed cavity-backed annular slot antenna is shown in Fig.3 and Fig.4 (top and side view respectively). The designed antenna is built on a 0.787mm thick substrate (ha ). The substrate has a dielectric constant of r =4.4 (value in CST). The cylinder-shaped cavities have a

The CST simulation return loss S11 results of the annular folded-slot antenna is displayed in Figure 5. It is seen that the resonance frequency is 263MHz while the input impedance is well matched (-20 dB). However, this antenna has only 1.3% of bandwidth. The far-eld E and H-planes antenna radiation patterns and the directivity are simulated and shown in Fig. 6 and Fig. 7. It can be observed that the designed antenna can achieve radiation patterns similar to that created by a vertical dipole.

Fig. 5. The simulated return loss S11 (by using CST) of the miniaturized cavity backed folded-slot antenna without L-C circuit

1481

(a)

(b)

Fig. 9.

The load circuit in CST

Fig. 6. The simulated radiation patterns 2D (CST) (a) E-plane and (b) Hplane without L-C circuit

Fig. 10. The simulated return loss S11 (CST) of the miniaturized cavity backed folded-slot antenna by adding L-C circuit

Fig. 7.

Simulation (CST) of directivity in 3D

In the next, in order to improve the impedance matching to wider bandwidth, we propose the geometry of the loaded LC circuit connected to the patch through a thin metallic pin [9],[10],[11]. The load conguration is given in Fig.8, it consists of an inductance Ls in series with a capacitor Cs . The L-C circuit along with dimensions folded-slot antenna determines the resonance frequency. The realization with CST is shown in Fig. 9. The simulated return loss S11 is shown in Fig. 10. The bandwidth is signicantly increased. As we can see by the Fig. 11, a modication of the far-eld radiation patterns. However the gain of antenna is reduced, the radiation patterns is like dipole antenna with vertically polarized in the E-plane.

(a)

(b)

Fig. 11. The simulated radiation patterns 2D (CST) (a) E-plane and (b) H-plane without L-C circuit

IV. C ONCLUSIONS This paper covered a design of miniaturized low prole antenna with vertical polarization. The radiation characteristic of annular folded-slot antenna with spiral elements is the same as a traditional vertical dipole antenna, but this antenna has a very low prole. Also it is seen that the miniaturization techniques presented in this paper gives rise to antennas as much as 6 times smaller than traditional slot antennas in the horizontal plane. Furthermore, this antenna solves the question of narrow-band miniaturized antenna with metallic pin and LC load; bandwidth can be optimized to 84MHz. Further studies are in progress to realize this L-C circuit by optimization of U-slot. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work is done under the MSIE project supported by the French Direction G en erale de la Comp etitivit e, de lIndustrie et des Services (DGCIS), The Direction G en erale

Fig. 8.

Geometry of the antenna load by adding shorting pins

1482

de lArmement (DGA/MRIS) and the Conseil G en eral of Paris. The authors will acknowledge the R egion Ile de France for the nancial support of this work R EFERENCES
[1] J. L. Volakis, Antenna engineering hand book, 4th ed., R. M. Osgood, Jr., Ed. New York: Mc-Graw-Hill, 2007. [2] Z. H. John Hmmg and A. Petros, A wide-band dual-polarized vhf microstrip antenna for global sensing of sea ice thickrmes, in Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium, pp. 684687. [3] W. Hong and K. Sarabandi, Low prole miniaturized planar antenna with omnidirectional vertically polarized radiation, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 56, no. 6, pp. 15331540, June 2008. [4] R. Azadegan and K. Sarabandi, A novel approach for miniaturization of slot antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 421429, Mar. 2003. [5] K. Hung and Y. Lin, Open-slot loaded monopole antennas for wlan and uwb applications, pp. 46534656. [6] A. A. Yang, F. and Y. Rahmat-Samii, A low-prole surface wave antenna equivalent to a vertical monopole antenna, in Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium, pp. 19391942. [7] K.Sarabandi and R.Azadegan, Design of an efcient miniaturized uhf planar antenna, in Proc.Antenna Propagat.Soc.Int.Symp.,AP-S, pp. 446 449. [8] N. B. Hong, W. and K. Sarabandi, Size reduction of cavity-backed slot antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 1461 1465, May 2006. [9] Z. S.-s. LIANG Xian-ling, Compact wideband caivity-backed slot antenna, Journal of SHANGHAI UNIVERSITY, vol. 11, no. 6, Dec. 2007. [10] N. Behdad and K. Sarabandi, A compact antenna for ultrawide-band applications, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 53, no. 7, pp. 2185 2192, 2005. [11] Z. j.-q. W. y. Duan Zhang-shan, Qu Shao-bo, A compact low-prole wideband omni-directional microstrip patch loading composite right/lefthanded transmission line, in Metamaterials, 2008 International Workshop onVolume, pp. 312315.

1483