Study on a simple satellite tracking on-board stacked antenna for ETS-VIII applications

摘要

The National Space Development Agency (NASDA) of Japan has planned to launch the geostationary satellite, Engineering Test Satellite-VIII (ETS-VIII), in 2004. In this paper, the feasibility of reaching a relatively high value of gain at low elevation angle by use of a simple circularly polarized 4-element stacked patch array antenna, without any phase shifter, for mobile satellite communications at the S-band frequency, aiming at ETS-VIII applications, is discussed. Furthermore, both numerical analyses and measurements are presented and investigated. It was revealed that, by properly feeding the patches constituting the antenna, four beams are created in the conical-cut plane at Az = 6°, 96°, 190°, and 276°. Besides, for an elevation El = 48° (θ= 42°) in Tokyo, the gain could reach more than 6.4 dBic on the whole azimuthal range with an axial ratio less than 3 dB.