Light Weight Man-portable High Frequency (HF) Antenna

For deployment scenarios where the primary communication bands are disrupted, the Army requires High Frequency (HF) antenna systems for backup communications. These HF systems must be transported, typically in man-pack fashion, to the battlefield. Current state-of-the art portable HF antennas used by the Army are heavy and time consuming to erect. Most available commercial architectures that reduce weight and are easier to assemble sacrifice performance (efficiency/gain over the operating bandwidth) for these features. Thus, the Army requires an updated HF antenna system that is light-weight, portable and reasonably efficient over the required bandwidth. Utilizing light-weight materials, such as carbon fiber cloth and manufactured magnetic materials (so called ‘metamaterials’), IERUS will design an HF antenna system that meets the physical and RF requirements. The resulting antenna design will have comparable performance relative to existing state-of-the-art antennas.