Design and analysis of Quadrifilar helical antenna for Cube-Sats using C-band frequency range for satellite communication

Abstract

Design and analysis of Quadrifilar helical antenna are presented in this paper. The proposed antenna is designed for Cube-Sats in the low earth and medium earth orbits. It is a combination of four helical antennas, each separated by 90?, and excited separately at the feeding point. The antenna is designed for operation at 4.5 GHz with an impedance bandwidth of 11.11 %. Design of the antenna is done in two steps. The first step being the design of a ground plane, which can make the antenna operate at 4.5 GHz. The second step is to analyze the antenna?s performance for different helix angles using the best ground plane dimensions obtained in the first step. The gain versus frequency curve has been obtained and the designed antenna is having a gain of more than 4 dB at the resonant frequency of 4.5 GHz.nema