Front to back ratio improvement of the Veraphase® GNSS antenna

This paper presents two solutions to improve the front to back ratio (FBR) of the VeraPhase® (VP6000) antenna. A compact and light disk structure and a ground plane with absorber layer located under the antenna were designed and optimized in the 3D RF simulator WIPL-D in order to reduce the FBR without impacting the other performances of the antenna. The optimized results show great improvement of the FBR at all frequencies from 2.5 dB up to 7.3 dB without reducing the gain in the upper hemisphere of the antenna. The proposed solution are both efficient and low cost solutions to optimize the FBR of the VP6000.