A micro air vehicle design based on a wideband antenna

A wideband antenna has been aerodynamically functionalized for flight capability. The antenna is based on a planar dipole/Vivaldi metallization scheme. The aerodynamic structure was based on the Nutball flier, a hobbyist flight architecture. The resulting codesign achieved a large VSWR 2:1 bandwidth from 100 MHz to over 2 GHz and omnidirectional dipole-like radiation patterns at the lower frequency region and more directional patterns at higher frequencies.