A Novel PIFA Antennas Design With Capacitive Load for Glacier Monitoring Applications

In glaciology, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) are frequently used to characterize electrical and physical properties of glaciers and snow coverages. An application is the estimation of the snow water equivalent of glaciers, coming from the knowledge of internal features of the glacier itself, such as its depth and density. For glacier monitoring, the usual frequencies space from few MHz to hundreds of MHz. Depending on the compromise between the penetration depth and the spatial resolution, the working frequency was determined. In this work, we designed, developed and measured a 300 MHz antenna used for this purpose. The shape and size were modeled in order to be used in portable systems; therefore, it was important to have light and small radiators. For this reason, we implement a novel planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) design with capacitive load, reaching small dimensions compared to the wavelength.