Platform Independent Omni-directional Antennas

Increasingly, enemy forces employ technologies that either depend on RF communications or produce detectable RF signatures. Thus, there are many types of RF signals and signatures that can be detected over a variety of different frequency bands and environments by RF sensors. When received, this information can be exploited to confront or avoid potential threats. These sensors operate on different platforms, and typically are tuned to detect specific threats, over unique frequency bands and with unique fidelity requirements on the received signals. As diverse as these applications are, so are the various antennas fabricated for use with these sensors. When a new sensing requirement arises, a new, application-specific antenna must be designed and developed. DARPA seeks to obviate the need to repeatedly develop application-specific antenna technology by developing a receive-only, omni-directional antenna that can be used for a range of RF sensor applications over a wide 6-18 GHz band. Barron Associates, Inc., in conjunction with L-3 Communications, Communication Systems-West, propose to develop a Platform-Independent Omni-Directional Antenna (PIODA), which will provide DARPA with a versatile, omni-directional antenna. With the additional requirements that the antenna be small and reconfigurable across the band, this challenging problem demands significant innovations in the antenna design.