Electronically Controlled Beam Steerable Dual-Band Star-Shaped DRA for UAS and Wi-Fi Data Link Applications

This communication presents a low-cost dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with beam steering capability in the
${S}$
- and
${C}$
-bands. A centrally fed star-shaped DRA (SDRA) is placed on a circular substrate with backside metallization. Four folded metallic parasitic strips are placed at each corner of the SDRA and grounded via four RF switches. The switches are controlled by an automated microcontroller circuit. It steers the beam in the entire azimuth plane. The antenna has multiple switching modes to carry out basic operations like searching and tracking in unmanned aircraft system (UAS) application. In basic debug mode, all RF switches are kept OFF or ON to check the working state of the antenna. In searching cum tracking (SCT) mode, the RF switches are used to steer the beam and to obtain bidirectional or unidirectional beam. The average peak gain of the antenna in SCT mode is more than 6 dBi. In basic mode, the antenna has a peak gain of ≈3.5 dBi. The measured results validate the beam steering concept.