Wideband and high-gain BeiDou antenna with a sequential feed network for satellite tracking

Abstract

BeiDou-3 navigation satellite system was officially opened in 2020. While bringing high-performance services to people around the world, the navigation system requires well-designed BeiDou antennas. In this paper, we propose a wideband circularly polarized high-performance BeiDou antenna. The antenna realizes wideband circularly polarized radiation through a four-port sequential feed network, and the phase imbalance of the feed network from 1.05 to 1.80 GHz is less than 7°. The manufactured antenna demonstrates a return loss of more than 13 dB and an axial ratio <3 dB over the entire global navigation satellite system (GNSS) frequency band. The right-handed circular polarization (RHCP) gain of the proposed antenna is greater than 4 dB in the GNSS low-frequency band and can reach more than 7.1 dB in the high-frequency band. Dimension of the proposed antenna is 120 mm×120 mm×20 mm, i.e., 0.54λ_o×0.54λ_o×0.09λ_o, where λ_o is the wavelength of the center frequency. The proposed antenna connected to a GNSS receiver has tracked 12 BeiDou satellites with C/N₀ ratios of GNSS signals greater than 30 dB. Such a high-performance antenna provides a basis for high-quality positioning services.

Keywords

BeiDou antenna / Wideband circularly polarized radiation / Four-port sequential feed network / Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver / Satellite tracking

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2023 Zhejiang University Press