Design of a Low Profile Archimedean Spiral Antenna using Compact Defected Ground Structure as a Reflector

In this paper, design and realisation of a low profile Archimedean spiral antenna is presented. The low profile Archimedean spiral antenna is printed on a substrate and backed by a reflector consisting of DGS. The DGS unit cell consists of a parallel combination of meander line inductors and inter-digital capacitors. This, DGS is one of the forms of electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structures providing electromagnetic band gap characteristics. It is used as a reflector with spiral antenna to achieve unidirectional radiation properties and a low profile of antenna. A modified version of uniplanar EBG cell is used as a DGS cell. This cell is used for configuration of the DGS ground plane. This ground plane is evaluated for its electrical characteristics and used as a reflector for the spiral antenna. Archimedean Spiral antenna is designed and simulated in the frequency band of 1-6GHz with DGS as a reflector. The antenna characteristics are studied for physical parameters of the antenna. These parameters are optimized for better electrical characteristics. The performance of the proposed antenna is also compared with conventional metallic (PEC) reflectors. Simulated results of an antenna are validated by measurement. Antenna height reduction of 60% is achieved compared to conventional cavity-backed spiral antennas

Wideband Antennas of Passive Seekers for Anti Radiation Missiles

Suppression of Enemy Air Defence (SEAD) is a fundamental element of Air Power application by means of in protecting friendly air attackers and destroying the enemy’s ability to defend against air attack. Most of the SEAD operation even today relies on Anti-radiation missile (ARM) which is an air-to-surface tactical missile designed to detect, seek, attack and destroy opponent’s radar. Passive seeker of ARM is a miniaturized ESM receiver which is capable of extracting the necessary angular data from the enemy radar emissions. Single head passive seeker covering wide frequency range from L to Ku band is the preferred choice. Wideband antennas have been designed and utilized for Direction Finding applications of ESM/ELINT receivers for ground, air and ship borne platforms. Unlike these platforms, there are several restrictions for passive seeker based compact ESM receiver for missile borne platform specially air to surface missile where lesser diameter is one of the preferred design parameter. This review paper mainly discusses the existing wideband antennas such as spiral, log-periodic, printed circuit vivaldi and all-metal vivaldi antennas and the comparison of their various parameters for passive seeker. The paper also suggests their suitability with respect to their placement on the missile for three configurations: concealed inside the radome, flush-mounted and conformal antenna based. The paper also brought about the specific test facility required for testing and evaluation of passive seeker to characterize it with missile radome which is the most challenging and time consuming task. Among the three passive seeker configuration discussed, conformal antenna based passive seeker using all-metal Vivaldi is the best option avoiding radome aberration correction which is being utilized in the present third generations of ARM. The second commonly and established passive seeker configuration is concealed inside the radome using spiral antennas where handling radome aberration correction is a limitation.&nbsp