A Second-Iteration Square Koch Fractal Slot Antenna for UHF Downlink Telemetry Applications in CubeSat Small Satellites

Abstract

This article presents the design, fabrication, and measurement of a square Koch fractal slot antenna for UHF band using both the FR4-G10 and Cuclad 250 substrates. Conveniently, this 56.56 cm full-length antenna possesses a geometry that allows it to be incorporated into the standardized 10 cm × 10 cm faces of the CubeSats. Furthermore, it is shown that both selected substrates exhibit an acceptable performance at the frequency of interest despite the economic cost difference and relative permittivity. Hence, the commercial FR4-G10 antenna substrate can be preferred because of its low-cost and admissible performance at 458 MHz, which is a frequency in the UHF band that is commonly used for telemetry, tracking, and command downlinks of CubeSats. Measurements show that the proposed antenna exhibits a reflection coefficient of −16.53 dB, a bandwidth of 22.62 MHz at −10 dB, a VSWR of 1.3508, a normalized impedance of 0.794 − j0.173 at 50 Ω, and a directivity of 2.24 dBi. The contribution of this work consists in the use of a fractal geometry to construct a low-cost slot antenna working at UHF frequencies over the limited area of the CubeSat faces and in order to optimize the area for an eventual coexistence with solar cells.