Development of Multiband Antenna for Satellite Applications

Satellite technology has progressed from the experimental stage to become sophisticated and powerful in a very short period of time. The use of artificial satellites to provide connectivity between various sites on Earth is known as satellite applications. Many studies have been conducted in order to increase the quality of satellite applications. One of the fundamental goals of achieving a high-quality satellite application is to achieve a very high gain. The tremendous gain of single band antennas is well recognized. However, a single band antenna can only use one frequency band at a time. On the other hand, multiband antenna offers the advantages of a single band antenna across multiple bands although they do not always provide the same gain as a single band antenna. As a result, this project is being carried out in order to design multiband antenna that will subsequently enhance the quality of satellite applications. In this paper, a multiband microstrip patch antenna is designed, simulated, fabricated and tested to operate for satellite applications resonating at 9 and 12 GHz. The performance of the simulated and fabricated antenna is assessed in terms of fundamental antenna characteristics. From the analysis and experimental results, it can be seen that the proposed antenna exhibits s11 of − 35.366 dB and − 32.269 dB at 9 GHz and 12 GHz, respectively. It also exhibits a good directivity with value of 8.0855 dBi at 9 GHz and 7.4503 dBi at 12 GHz. The gain is considered acceptable with 7.356 dB at 9 GHz and 6.1065 dB at 12 GHz. Based on the measured results, the fabricated multiband microstrip antenna shows an acceptable s11 value of − 22.13 dB at 9 GHz and − 21.043 dB at 12 GHz.