VHF/UHF Open-Sleeve Dipole Antenna Array for Airborne Ice Sounding and Imaging Radar
Hoyun Won, Yang‐Ki Hong, Linfeng Li, Abhishek Awasthi, N. Nickerson, Briana Bryant, Minyeong Choi, Stephen Yan, Drew Taylor, Charles O’Neill, Joohan Lee
Abstract
This letter presents a simple, lightweight, and ultrawideband, the very high frequency/ultrahigh frequency (VHF/UHF) open-sleeve dipole antenna array for airborne ice measuring radar. The proposed antenna array achieves a wide bandwidth of 300 MHz via mutual coupling from neighboring excited elements. A hollow aluminum tube is used for both dipole and parasitic elements to minimize the antenna's weight. The simulation results show that to achieve a bandwidth of 300 MHz with a peak realized gain up to 12 dBi in the frequency range from 170 to 470 MHz, the length of the dipole (L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">dip</sub> ) and parasitic elements (L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">para</sub> ) of elements 1 and 4 of the four-element antenna array need to be 670 mm and 200 mm, respectively. At the same time, elements 2 and 3 require an L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">dip</sub> of 640 mm and L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">para</sub> of 180 mm. Based on these dimensions, a four-element antenna array is fabricated and tested. The measured antenna performance results show a good agreement with the simulated results.