High Gain 4×4 Microstrip Rectangular Patch Array Antenna for C-Band Satellite Applications

Abstract

C-band satellite receiving antenna requires a high gain to reach the long-distance wireless transmission between ground station and satellite. Among various antenna types, the advantages of microstrip antennas are low profile, easy to fabricate, easy to feed, easy to incorporate with other microstrip circuit elements and integrate into systems, and easy to use in an array to increase the directivity. This paper proposes a microstrip array antenna consist of a 4×4 rectangular-shaped patch radiating element with a microstrip line feeding technique using a quarter-wavelength transformer impedance matching. The array antenna technique has the purpose of obtaining high gain and achieving greater directivities. This research considers an FR-4 Epoxy substrate in which the thickness and dielectric constant are 1.6 mm and 4.3, respectively, to deploy the antenna structure. The antenna design is simulated and parameterized by using CST Microwave Studio to obtain the most optimum performance. The result shows that the 4×4 microstrip rectangular patch array antenna has an overall gain of 13.7 dB, and from the return-loss graph shows, the working bandwidth is 734 MHz ranges from 3.794-4.528 GHz. These results indicate that the proposed antenna design is suitable and promising for C-band satellite applications.