Design of Space-borne Ultra-wideband Lightweight Tightly Coupled Antenna Array

In this paper, a novel space-borne ultra-wideband tightly coupled antenna element is proposed The antenna element is an improvement on the traditional tightly coupled Vivaldi antenna element. By optimizing the feed structure from microstrip line to slot line and reducing the height of radiation arm of Vivaldi antenna, the profile of antenna element is greatly reduced By slotting the radiation arm of Vivaldi antenna and introducing electric dipole to participate in energy radiation, the working bandwidth of the antenna is greatly expanded The impedance matching of the whole frequency band is realized by introducing the resonantfrequency point by loading T-slot on the radiation arm. The size of the antenna unit is 25mm X 25mm X 64mm. The VSWR of the antenna unit is less than 2.1 in the range of 0.8 similar to 6GHz. The simulated radiation efficiency was demonstrated to be 87%, across the band The simple structure greatly reduces the weight of the antenna, which has to be loaded onto a satellite.