Design and Performance Analysis of High Gain Flexible Yagi Microstrip Patch Antenna for Fixed-satellite, Radio Location and Amateur-satellite Service Applications

The motive behind this research is to design and propose high gain flexible Yagi microstrip patch antenna for fixed-satellite, radiolocation, amateur-satellite service applications and to analyse the performance of flexible Yagi patch antenna with change in the length of reflectors, spacing between reflectors and spacing between directors. The proposed flexible Yagi Microstrip patch antenna is capable of operating at 5.85 GHz and has been optimized to best performance to be suitably employed for fixed-Satellite, radiolocation, amateur-satellite service applications. The employed substrate in the proposed Yagi microstrip antenna is flexible FR-4 having dielectric constant of 4.4 and thickness of 0.15 mm. The objective of using flexible substrate is to make Yagi antenna resilient against mechanical pressure and bending. The radiating patch has been placed in between the directors and reflectors in order to form Yagi configuration and the rectangular patch has been fed by using the microstrip feed. The copper (Cu) of thickness 17 microns has been employed for the design of radiating patch, microstrip feed line, reflectors, directors and ground in the proposed Yagi antenna. The performance analysis of the proposed Yagi antenna has been carried out in terms of the return loss (dB), impedance bandwidth (GHz), gain (dB), directivity (dBi), VSWR and antenna impedance. The proposed Yagi antenna is resonant at 5.85 GHz with corresponding return loss of 69.97dB. The proposed antenna has gain of 9.2 dB and directivity of 9.0 dBi, thus making it suitably to be termed as high gain antenna. The antenna has been designed and simulated using CST Microwave Studio 2016. The proposed antenna has been practically fabricated and tested using E5071C Network Analyser and anechoic chamber. It has been observed that experimental results closely match with simulated results.