Printed Conformal Crossed Dipole Antenna

Abstract

This paper presents a conformal crossed dipole antenna at L/S – band. The two pairs of radiating arms are designed to be printed on the inner and outer surface of a thin spherical dielectric shell, which offers mechanical stability and performance improvement. Full-wave EM simulation is carried out to examine the performance of the proposed antenna compared with the reference design. It is shown how to mitigate the effect that the conformal dielectric loading of the shell has on the antenna operating frequency. The radiation performance is presented to prove that the conformal configuration of the crossed dipoles can have a broader axial ratio beamwidth and wider field of view at the resonant frequency with respect to its planar equivalent. The proposed antenna is suitable for applications such as global positioning satellite reception.