Miniaturization Capability of the Pixel Antenna for Nanosatellite Footprints

Present day dimension of satellites is constantly being scaled down; hence, there is a stronger need for the antennas placed on them to be highly miniaturized. The emergence of small satellites needs new antenna designs compatible with footprints scaled down highly comparative to that of traditional satellites for similar earth coverage operation. The phenomenon of transverse evanescent modes of the inner cavity field and their wide band capability (Monediere et al. in Int J Antennas Propagat 2014 [1]) allows the pixel antenna design to be a feasible approach for miniaturization on such scale. The antenna proposed in this paper is redesigned to be used as a lone pixel, but it can be arranged as an array in the agile reconfigurable radiating matrix format, hence being termed as pixel antennas (Jecko and Arnaud in FERMAT, 20, 2017 [2, 3]). The objectivity of this present work is to establish the miniaturization capability of this pixel antenna by designing a miniaturized planar antenna for a small satellite specification, implanted on a nanosatellite and to realize the communication uplink/downlink links in right hand circularly polarized in the upper UHF band.