Dual-Band Folded-End Dipole Antenna for Plastic CubeSats

In this article, a dual-band folded-end dipole antenna is proposed for plastic CubeSat platforms. The proposed antenna has a compact structure which is integrated in a miniaturized satellite, i.e., CubeSat, without any deployment mechanism. This is achieved by folding the dipole antenna around the CubeSat circumference. In addition, by folding the dipole, the antenna provides a dual-band performance centered at 2.5 and 4.7 GHz, respectively. The folded-end dipole forms a square loop with a gap of tunable width which can be adjusted to tune its impedance. Finally, the measured gain of the proposed design is 7 and 4.3 dBi with a -10 dB bandwidth of 500 and 250 MHz at S- and C-band, respectively.