Design of Integrated Antenna for 3-D Direction Finding in RADAR Applications

A compact and novel shaped microstrip patch antenna integrated with an array of circular split ring resonators is designed for 3D direction finding in RADAR applications. The integrated metamaterial antenna designed using HFSS software consists of four CSRR unit cells which are mounted over the triangular Patch. And a defected ground plane structure is introduced to improve the antenna performance. To reduce the power consumption, the proposed antenna system (which is fixed on an avionic vehicle) works as a receiver terminal with a separate transmitting base station on the ground. This antenna reveals a minimum return loss of -15 dB and Voltage standing wave ratio of 2:1 ranging from 8 GHz to 12 GHz in the X-Band with suitable radiation pattern. In addition, since the designed antenna has minimized structure with the size 20 mm × 15 mm, which shows it is super-suitable for avionic vehicles.