DESIGN OF A UAV BLADE MONOPOLE WITH THE USE OF DIFFERENT RTADIATING ELEMENTS AND SIMULATION OF DRA ANTENNA

Abstract

Because of its small size, light weight, and aerodynamic design that causes the least amount of drag blade monopole antennas are favored for usage in airborne applications. Consequently, their radiation patterns are unipolar and produce deep nulls in the upward direction. Such patterns will cause severe blind spots for the aircraft above and below this plane, which is undesirable for avionics networks. [1] To solve this problem, a dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is attached to the blade antenna and thus a different design is formed. In this paper a rectangular DRA is used to illustrate the main idea.The antenna is housed inside the aerodynamically designed radome to reduce air drag (large dome-shaped structures which protect the radars from the bad weather conditions but at the same time allow the electromagnetic signals to be received by the radar without any distortion or attenuation). [11] An air core coil is also provided for DC grounding proposes. The antenna configuration is first optimized using HFSS based Ansys Electronics Desktop Student 2021 R2 simulation software and latter practically implemented. The comparison of simulated results is also presented in this paper.