Tilted-Beam Switched Array Antenna for UAV Mounted Radar Applications with 360° Coverage

Abstract

A highly efficient antenna array for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mounted radar applications with a tilted-beam characteristic and a 360° beam coverage is proposed in this paper. The proposed array antenna is configured by four planar super J-pole antennas with 2-dimensional ground reflectors. Each super J-pole antenna element provides a high directivity where the peak gain is tilted about 45° facing toward the ground from the bottom of a UAV body. Thus, the air-to-ground communication difficulty due to the altitude difference between the UAV and ground targets can be effectively solved. Further, the four super J-pole elements with a switched operation can cover the whole 360° areas around the UAV while high antenna gain is maintained. To verify the performance, the proposed structure was implemented at 5.9 GHz with an overall volume of 0.88 × 0.88 × 0.83 λo3. The measured 10-dB impedance bandwidths for all four antenna elements were better than 27.2% and the isolation among the four antenna ports was also always better than 13 dB. The measured peak gain was better than 7.4 dBi and tilted at 45° in the elevation angle. Lastly, the measured half power beam widths in elevation and azimuth planes were more than 60° and 87°, respectively.

Low‐complexity framework for GNSS jamming and spoofing detection on moving platforms

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Horizontal Polarized DC Grounded Omnidirectional Antenna for UAV Ground Control Station

“…The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly expanding to commercial, scientific, agricultural, and military applications [ 4 ]. To overcome the difficulty of finding the exact location of mobile UAVs from ground control stations (GCS), omnidirectional antennas are utilized to resolve acquisition and pointing complications [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]. It has been proven that using horizontally polarized antennas can achieve a 10 dB improvement in terms of system gain as compared to vertically polarized antennas [ 11 ].…”

Quarter Wavelength Fabry–Perot Cavity Antenna with Wideband Low Monostatic Radar Cross Section and Off-Broadside Peak Radiation

“…The proposed antenna can potentially be used in this scenario. Similarly, for the aerial security, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications, it can be used on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones where downward pointing high gain beam is more pragmatic for communication with the ground targets [31]. The development of low RCS multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas is also becoming popular due to their technological advantages, and as such, the proposed technique can be further developed to realize pattern decorrelated low observable MIMO antennas [32,33].…”