Patch antennas for VHF vs Ka-band The very large & the very small

The design of the VHF patch antenna was straight forward and the desired performance was easily achieved from the prototype. On the other hand, this was not the case for the Ka-band patch. While edge-fed Ka-band patch antennas and arrays of such patches have been successfully designed, the difficulty here seemed to be with the ldquoaperture-fedrdquo Ka-band patch. Regardless of these difficulties, there is no doubt that hardware requiring aperture-fed patches will remain in our future. Two important lessons were learned from this authorpsilas experience that may help in that regard. Namely, 1) computational modeling tools must take into account substrate-groundplane truncation, and 2) rigid substrate(s) with micrometer-tolerance circuitry (lines and spaces) are a must.