Compact S-Band Ship Borne Reconfigurable Receiving Antenna for Down-Range Telemetry Application

The article presents the design and development of a dual circularly polarized S-band ship borne reconfigurable antenna for down range telemetry application. The objective is to produce a wide beam and a narrow beam using the same aperture. The antenna system is capable of producing simultaneous dual circular polarization, namely left hand and right hand circular polarization. The low gain wide beam cross dipole antenna shares same aperture with high gain narrow beam cross dipole array antenna. The required mode of operation is judiciously selected on time sharing basis depending upon the range of the object. The system has been realized and experimentally validated. Realized impedance bandwidth is better than 10% at each of the ports with inter-port isolation ≥ 18 dB. Measured gain of wide beam element is 8 dBi and that of narrow beam array is 13.5 dBi over the entire operating band. Relevant results are also presented.