Low-Profile Wideband Solar-Cell-Integrated Circularly Polarized CubeSat Antenna for the Internet of Space Things

Abstract

This paper proposes a low-profile wideband circularly polarized (CP) antenna using solar cell patches as radiation elements and a sequentially rotated feeding network for CubeSat applications. To realize a wide axial ratio (AR) bandwidth with a compact size, a sequentially rotated feeding network was designed by modifying a quadrature hybrid coupler and a rat-race coupler that has a small change in phase difference even when the frequency changes. A wideband CP patch array antenna was designed by combining a Cshaped slot-coupled solar cell patch in conjunction with a novel feeding network. The overall size of the proposed CP CubeSat antenna is 100 × 100 × 7.2 mm 3 (0.83 λo × 0.83 λo × 0.06 λo at 2.5 GHz). Solar cells occupy 79% of the antenna area, enabling efficient energy harvesting. The -10 dB impedance bandwidth is 1.98-3.0 GHz, which is a fractional bandwidth of approximately 41.0%. The 3-dB AR and 3-dB gain bandwidths are 1.98-3.0 GHz (41.0%) and 1.82-2.98 GHz (46.6%), respectively. The proposed CP solar patch array antenna demonstrates a constant radiation pattern within the -10 dB impedance bandwidth. The proposed CubeSat antenna is suitable for use in an Internet of Space Things (IoST) autonomous communication system.INDEX TERMS circularly polarized antenna, CubeSat antenna, hybrid coupler, Internet of Space Things, S-band antenna, sequentially rotated antenna, solar cell integrated antenna.

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