Multifunctional Design of Load Bearing Antenna Structure for Small UAVs

In this project Shared Spectrum Company, Virginia Tech, and MRF Technologies develop and demonstrate a small UAV antenna suite that uses existing conducting UAV airframe components as radiating elements. We develop and demonstrate an efficient antenna impedance matching circuit that requires negligible prime power, that has high IP3 values (+40 dBm), and that has low insertion loss (< 2 dB). We develop an adaptive feedback control scheme that properly tunes the matching network within a short time period (<< 1 sec) with minimal impact to the UAV transceiver. We determine the feasibility of multi-antenna operation to control the antenna pattern via coherent combining or for Multi-Input, Multi-Output (MIMO) applications. We validate the antenna performance by building a prototype antenna and measuring its gain.