High Gain Substrate Slotted Microstrip Patch Antenna Design for X-band Satellite Uplink Applications

This paper presents high gain substrate slotted microstrip patch antenna design for X-band satellite applications. The proposed antenna has been designed by using the substrate of Flame Retardant 4 (FR4) having dielectric constant epsilon(r) of 4.4. The ground, patch and the feedline are made of copper material having thickness of 0.02 mm and conductivity of 5.58 x 106 Siemens/rn. The proposed antenna has been fed through microstrip feedline via impedance transformer. The impedance transformer has been used to match the impedance of proposed antenna to 50 Omega impedance of the SMA connector used to feed power to the designed antenna. The proposed antenna has been designed and simulated using CST Microwave Studio 2014. The proposed antenna covers the X-band satellite uplink (7.9 GHz-8.4 GHz) frequency band making it suitable to be employed for satellite communication applications. Apart, the proposed antenna finds its applications in indoor location and RFID tag (tracking equipment) applications. The simulated antenna design has been practically fabricated and tested by using Network Analyser E5071C and anechoic chamber. It has been observed that the practical results closely match with the simulated antenna results, thus signifying that the proposed antenna design can be feasibly employed for proposed applications.