DESIGN AND APPLICATIONS OF MULTI-FEED STRUCTURAL ANTENNA ON ELECTRICALLY SMALL PLATFORMS

Abstract

Antenna miniaturization is an active research topic for applications with limited design space. One approach to construct an antenna under such constraint is to make the entire platform a radiator. This thesis presents a systematic method for designing such an antenna on an electrically small platform based on Characteristic Mode (CM) Analysis. By choosing the appropriate feed structure, a Multi-Feed Structural Antenna (MFSA) is designed. It can also be used in MIMO systems by strategically selecting the CMs. The MFSA designed on a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SUAV) verifies the usefulness of the proposed methodology. The radiation patterns of the MFSA are synthesized by linearly combining weighted Individual-Element-Radiation-Patterns. In order to exploiting the beamforming capability of MFSA in Direction Finder (DF) applications, a new weight estimation method is proposed. A VHF DF is developed on a SUAV model and has been experimentally verified to have good DF performance.