Compact End-fire Antenna Designs for PicoSat Integration and Other Small Satellite Missions

Two planar Yagi-Uda antenna designs for integration on the solar modules of PicoSats are proposed. One antenna is designed to be implemented on top of the solar cell while the other configuration is based on the removal of one of the extra solar modules to ease design whilst using FR4 as a substrate underneath. Miniaturization techniques such as effective artificial dielectrics and meandered dipoles are employed to overcome space constraints imposed by the PicoSat footprint (5 cm by 5 cm) while maintaining good antenna performance. Full end-fire radiation is achieved at 2.4GHz with the first design and peak gain values are around 5dBi while the impedance bandwidth is 6%. Quasi-end-fire radiation is achieved at 8GHz for the second design when integrated directly on the solar cell glass with gain values around 1dBi. Both designs comply with minimum requirements for successful downlink connections. These antennas can be implemented on PicoSats for commercial missions such as Earth Observation (EO) or telemetry for instance, CubeSats, and other small satellite missions.