2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS) , Shanghai, China, 8- 11 August

High Gain Substrate Sltted Micrstrip Patch Antenna Design fr

X-band Satellite Uplink Applicatins
Divesh Mittal!, Avneet Kaur 2 , Maninder Singh 2, Roopan 2,
Raveena Bhatoa3, Anshula Garg 2, and Ekambir Sidhu2
1 Department of Civil Engineering, Punjabi University, Patiala, India
2Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Punjabi University, Patiala, India
3Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Punjabi University, Patiala, India

Abstract- This paper presents high gain substrate slotted microstrip patch antenna design for
X-band satellite applications. The proposed antenna has been designed by using the substrate
of Flame Retardant 4 (FR4) having dielectric constant er of 4.4. The ground, patch and the
feedline are made of copper material having thickness of 0.02 mm and conductivity of 5.58 x
106 Siemens/rn. The proposed antenna has been fed through microstrip feedline via impedance
transformer. The impedance transformer has been used to match the impedance of proposed
antenna to 50 S1 impedance of the SMA connector used to feed power to the designed antenna.
The proposed antenna has been designed and simulated using CST Microwave Studio 2014. The
proposed antenna covers the X-band satellite uplink (7.9 GHz- 8.4 GHz) frequency band making
it suitable to be employed for satellite communication applications. Apart, the proposed antenna
finds its applications in indoor location and RFID tag (tracking equipment) applications. The
simulated antenna design has been practically fabricated and tested by using Network Analyser
E5071C and anechoic chamber. It has been observed that the practical results closely match with
the simulated antenna results, thus signifying that the proposed antenna design can be feasibly
employed for proposed applications.
1. INTRODUCTION

There is an immense need of compact size and light weight antennas which can be easily integrated
in modern communication systems. The microstrip patch antennas have been widely used in
high performance satellit es and wireless communication devices due to their low cost, low profile,
light weight, ease of fabrication and compatibility of integration with circuit technology [1]. The
microstrip patch antenna is usually fabricated on a FR4 substrate sandwiched between a conducting
patch and a conducting ground. The patch can be designed in many shapes like rectangular,
circular, triangular, elliptical, square, ring and many more but the rectangular shape is widely used
because of its simplicity associated with the design. MPA have successfully covered a diverse range
of applications like IMT, Bluetooth, WiMAX, WLAN [2], security and biomedical purposes [3].
However low bandwidth, low power handling capacity, low gain and low directivity are the major
drawbacks of MPA [4]. There are various ways of improving antenna parameters, one of them can
be the employment of the metamaterials [4] in the antenna. However, if it is desired to have dual
band or multiband characteristics in some applications, e.g., satellite communication and for many
applications, dual band/triple band design is required so that these designs with compact patch
size are necessarily required. These characteristics can be obtained by coupling multiple radiating
elements or by using tuning devices such as varactor diodes [5 ,6]. However, these methods make
antenna more complicated. Embedding a slot in the patch or a substrate is the another method of
improving various antenna parameters [7]. A circular hole in the substrate can be etched in order
to increase the return loss (dB) parameter of the proposed antenna design. The X-band technology
has been broadly used in various applications because of its high data transmission rate, large
bandwidth and short-range features. Designing X-band antennas has tempted the interest of many
researchers and is still a major challenge to equalize these applications [8- 10].
2. ANTENNA GEOMETRY
The antenna has been designed by using dielectric substrate of FR4 material (Flame Retardant
4) having dielectric constant of 4.4 and thickness of 1.57 mm. The antenna has a compact area
of 16.848 x 33.1 mm 2 as shown in Figure l(a). The patch, ground and the feedline are made of
copper of thickness 0.02 mm and conductivity of 5.58 x 106 Siemens/rn. The dimensions of the
ground plane are same as that of substrate. The circular slot of radius 1 mm has been cut in the
substrate in order to improve the return loss and impedance bandwidth of the antenna as shown
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2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS) , Shanghai, China, 8- 11 August

in side view of antenna in Figure l(b). The position of the circular slot is optimized so as to
attain the best results. The total thickness of the designed antenna is 1.61 mm. The power to the
designed antenna is fed through feedline of width 5.58 mm via impedance transformer. The width
of impedance transformer is computed in such a way that it matches the impedance of antenna
with 50 n impedance of SMA connector. The antenna design parameters are given in Table 1.
Table 1. Antenna dimensions.
Antenna Dimensions

Value (mm)

Width of substrate and ground plane, W g

33.10

Length of substrate and ground plane, L g

16.84

Width of patch, W p

23.68

Length of patch, L p

07.42

Width of impedance transformer, W t

02.00

Length of impedance transformer, L t

02.00

Width of feedline, WJ

05.58

Length of feedline, L J

02.71

Radius of circular slot, D s

01.00

Depth of circular slot

01.57

Distance of slot from extreme left, D x

15.55

Distance of slot from extreme top, D y

03.52

Thickness of substrate, T s

01.57

Thickness of patch and ground plane, T p

00.02

~
D.

W.

L,
L

D. jDY D.

"" Ground

Patch

Subs trate

Lf
Feedline ---'"

Tp
(b)

(a)

Figure 1. (a) Top view of proposed antenna. (b) Side view of proposed antenna.

3. SIMULATED RESULTS

The proposed antenna has been designed and simulated in CST Microwave Studio 2014. The antenna performance has been analysed in terms of bandwidth (MHz) , return loss (dB) , resonant
frequency (GHz) , gain (dB), directivity (dBi) , VSWR, impedance, Half Power Beamwidth (degrees). The designed antenna has been observed to be resonant at 8.2 GHz with an operating
bandwidth of 575 MHz and the return loss (S11) of -58.22 dB as shown in Figure 2. The proposed
antenna has high gain of 8.569dB as shown in Figure 3(a) and the antenna has been found to
be highly directional with the directivity of 8.283 dBi as shown in Figure 3(b). The Half Power
Beamwidth (HPBW) plot shown in Figure 4 illustrates the polar plot with angular width in degrees at 8.2 GHz. The VSWR value of the proposed antenna is 1.0024 within operating range of
frequencies and is less than its maximum acceptable value of 2 as demonstrated in Figure 5. The
impedance of the proposed antenna has been observed to be 49.98 n shown in Figure 6.
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2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS) , Shanghai, China, 8- 11 August

w ,-----------------------------------~~~~--_,

51,1

10 11-----:------;-----,-----.,...----..----;------;-----'1:--1"---.------1
20
.. _---_._ ..

30

uuuJq

-40 .

( 84

50

.58:145)1]" .

58.22
10

freq ueocy I GJ,

Figure 2. Return loss plot of the proposed antenna.

..,

... U

6. 4 3
8.57
4 .2 8

IL ;;J: 1
".1 4

2. 0 7

2.111

- 7 . 86
- 1 5.7

-7 . 93
- 1 5 .9

- 2 3.6

- 2 3. "

- 3 1.4

'=
=:~0:In
c"""""""
ou""'
~':a":,~:

-3 1 .7

"".

Fa,lIeld
enebled(kR ,. .. ,)
:'::eId ( t. B.2)[I J

~~:'tnatlOn
c~_

F8rllllid
o noblod ( kR .. .. I)
::~~ield ( l.e .2) (11

O utput

O.2853d8
O.2853d8

,.,

Tot . e we.

,.,

DlreellvRy

~~:':f7~:

O.2B!!I3 dB
O.2B53 dB

e 283 dllj

(a)

(b)

Figure 3. (a) Direct ivity plot of t he proposed antenna. (b) Gain of the proposed antenna.
Farfield Di"ectivly Abs (Phi=90)
-

farfield (f=8,2) [ 1]

.,
.B

.
.1
1

.B

.,

Frequency = 8.2

Main lobe magntude ==

Theta

8.29 dBi

I Degree vs. dBi

Side lobe level

'~""!"

.1

Man lobe dtection ==

4.0 deg.
Angular width (3 dB) = 92.3 d eg.

180

- 12.3 dB

Figure 4. HPBW plot of t he proposed antenna .

_ '''''

jJ

I'

Figure 5. VSWR plot of the proposed antenna.

S-Parameter [Impedance View]

0 (-0 .285, 2. 18e-0(6) Ohm

10 (7 .36, -16.4) Ohm

Frequency

51,1 (49.98 Ohm)

I GHz

Figure 6. Smith chart of the proposed antenna.

4. MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA

The mathematical governing equation for the dependence of antenna return loss Sn (1) on frequency
(1) can be mathematically modelled and expressed as:

Sn(1) =

_ 8.40 5 e- ((Sl1(f) -8.314)/1.035)2 _ 20.06 e-( (Sl1(f )-8.208)/ 0.1532)2

- 37.87 e - ((Sll (f) -8.197)/0.00908)2 _ 4.967 e -( (S ll (f)-6.185)/ 0.279)2

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2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS) , Shanghai, China, 8- 11 August

The return loss versus frequency plot of the above mathematically modelled equation for the
proposed antenna has been plotted and shown in Figure 7 below.

Mathematically modelled Return Loss

Simulated Rerum Loss

.so
.700~---+---------!'--------+--------!-----!5---+----~---+--------+-~
F ,.,,~ . n e ~

I GHZ

Figure 7. Return loss plot of mathematically modelled equation.

The percentage error between mathematically modelled return loss and simulated return loss
has been computed to be 6.896% corresponding to the resonant frequency of 8.2 GHz.
5. EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION

The proposed antenna design has been practically fabricated and tested using E5071C network
analyser and anechoic chamber. The top view and the bottom view of fabricated antenna are
shown in Figures 8( a) and (b) respectively. The designed antenna practically resonates at 8.24 GHz
with areturn loss of -38.84dB and has an operating impedance bandwidth of 581 MHz as shown
in Figure 9.

(b)

(a)

Figure 8. (a) Top view of fabricated antenna. (b) Bottom view of fabricated antenna.

Figure 9. Practical return loss plot of fabricated antenna.

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2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS) , Shanghai, China, 8- 11 August

6 . CON C LUSI O N

The proposed antenna has been designed and simulated in CST Microwave Studio 2014. It has been
observed that proposed antenna design resonates at 8.2 GHz with operating bandwidth of 575 MHz
and return loss (Sn) of -58.22 dB. The gain corresponding to resonant frequency is 8.69 dB and
has directivity of 8.283 dBi . The VSWR value is less than maximum acceptable value (i.e. , 2) . The
proposed design has been practically fabricated and tested using E5071C network analyser and
anechoic chamber. It has been observed that the practical results closely match with the simulated
results.
This proposed design can be suitably employed for X band earth to satellite uplink applications
(7 .9 GHz- 8.4 GHz) at high data rate and with minimum attenuation due to atmospheric changes .
Also, the designed antenna finds its application in indoor location and RFID tag (8 .2 GHz) , Defence
systems, radio-determination applications, radio astronomy and space research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We would like to express our sincere gratitude towards Prof. Ekambir Sidhu, Assistant Professor,
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Punjabi University Patiala for his
guidance, supervision and undying support. We would also like to thank our senior Jaspreet Singh
and colleague Simarjit Singh Saini who helped us a lot in completion of research work.

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