Experimental Investigations of a Novel Lightweight Blade Antenna for UAV Applications [Antenna Applications Corner]

Small, lightweight, and broadband antennas are a growing need for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms due to the increasing demand of highly integrated systems for both electronic warfare (EW) and communication-oriented applications. In this article, an experimental characterization of a compact printed passive wide-band dipole antenna is presented. The main advantages of this design are the reduction of both the height and the weight of the antenna while keeping the structure as tough as possible from an environmental point of view with the only drawback being a tradeoff with respect to voltage-standing wave ratio (VSWR) performances. The simplicity (no lumped passive components are used to match the antenna input impedance to 50 X) and performance effectiveness of the proposed antenna is such that it avoids a complicated screening process among different phase-matched sets of radiating elements. The experimental characterization was performed through a near-field measurement setup, showing excellent agreement with numerical fullwave simulations.