Miniature Ultra-Wideband Antenna on Novel Substrates

One of the greatest technical challenge facing submarine communications is fielding antennas capable of high data rates required by future broadcast circuits. Example antennas include those for communications, navigation, and Identification of Friend or Foe (IFF) capabilities. As compared to surface ship antennas, submarine antennas are unique in design, shape, materials, and performance due to their different requirements. Among these are the extreme environmental conditions, and the more recent stealth considerations. During Phase I, we successfully demonstrated a number of miniaturization concepts for broadband slot spiral antenna. As a result of these efforts, we now have an optimized design for the 6" slot spiral aperture that can provide -15dB gain down to 100MHz, 0dB gain above 500MHz and +5dB gain above 1000MHz. The main objective of the proposed Phase II work is to realize the proposed designs and to perform optimization and trade off studies for the practical implementation of these. We will also fabricate various size apertures and measure these in indoor anechoic chambers and outdoor ranges for validation. Our goal during Phase II is not only to extend the performance of these apertures down to 20MHz, but also to extend the upper frequency operation up to 18GHz. In addition during Phase II we will pursue system applications related to Communications and Acquisitions Direction Finding (CADF), Low Band Direction Finding (LBDF) and UHF SATCOM link systems.