Design of quadrifilar helical antenna for use on small satellites

The paper describes the design and construction of a quadrifilar helical antenna (QHA) with a saddle pattern and circular polarization. The QHA has gained attention as an antenna suitable for use in low Earth orbit satellite communication systems, because of the low weight, size, cost and also proper performance. The QHA structure consists of four coaxial identical elements, which are fed in quadrature phase. Each element is made up of two radial and one helical section. This antenna was introduced by C.C. Kilgus (see IEEE Trans. Antennas and Propag., p.499-500, 1968) and was used first for amateur satellite communication applications (Bricker, R. and Rickert, H., 1974). The small multi-mission satellite (SMMS) is a common LEO satellite that is used to cover the Asia-Pacific region. The QHA is suggested for using in telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) and data collection subsystems of the SMMS in the S and UHF bands respectively. In this project, the QHA has been designed for the TT&C subsystem with a narrow bandwidth at 2.26 GHz.