Dielectric Resonator Antenna

Naval aircrafts are covered with many antennas for VHF/UHF Line-of-sight communications, UHF SATCOM, L-band, and GPS functions. The blade type antennas employed have limited bandwidths. Low-profile cavity-backed antennas will require hull penetration inside the aircraft. Thus, the objective of this program is to investigate innovative concepts such as the Dielectric Resonator Antenna (DRA) to achieve better performance over the current designs, with wider bandwidths, and ability to consolidate the various bands into a single structure to free up space for future additions, mitigate interference between antennas, as well as to reduce the size of the antennas. A volumetric source such as the DRA, as opposed to a printed planar or a wire source, inherently provides higher bandwidths. In the Phase I program, multimode DRA designs covering UHF, L-band, and GPS L1 and L2 bands were completed. Two types of L-band 960-1220 MHz Omni Tx/Rx antennas were prototyped and results were presented. The objective of the proposed Phase II effort is to extend the Phase I investigations to develop a single antenna structure that supports several bands with different modes of operation. Furthermore, we propose to focus on the product-versions of the consolidated antennas, and to demonstrate these antennas with prototypes.