High gain textilem microstrip patch antenna design employing denim substrate for Ku band satellite applications

Abstract

The high gain dual resonant textile microstrip patch antenna with extended ground plane suitable to be employed for satellite Ku band uplink and downlink communication applications has been proposed in this paper. The proposed textile antenna has been fabricated over the wearable textile material — Denim as a substrate having dielectric constant εr= 1.6. The radiating patch and the ground plane are designed using copper of thickness 0.05mm and conductivity of 5.58×106 Siemens/m. The designed textile antenna is dual resonant at 12.64GHz and 13.515GHz with operating bandwidth of 1.57GHz (12.4GHz–13.97GHz) and minimal return loss of −71.86dB and −26.28dB, respectively. The antenna has high gain of 8.25dB at 12.64GHz and 6.14dB at 13.515GHz and directivity of 7.97dBi at 12.64GHz and 5.8dBi at 13.515GHz. The proposed antenna has been designed and simulated using CST Microwave Studio 2014. The proposed textile antenna can be suitably employed for Ku-band applications in vehicle mounted earth stations (12.5GHz–12.75GHz), space research and VSAT applications (12.75GHz–13.5GHz). The simulated antenna has been practically fabricated and tested using E5071C Network Analyzer and anechoic chamber. It has been concluded that the practical results closely match with the simulated antenna results.