Conformal printed traveling wave antenna composed of interdigital capacitor structure

The design and experimentation of conformal printed traveling wave antenna composed of interdigital capacitor structures is presented. The antenna which is designed to work around center frequency of 2.35MHz for experimental-rocket communication with the ground station is deployed on a 0.127mm thick of RT/Duroid R® 6010LM dielectric substrate. The use of very thin dielectric substrate for antenna realization intends to be conformable with the cylindrical body of experimental-rocket. Prior hardware realization, the parameters of antenna including reflection coefficient, gain, and radiation pattern are investigated to obtain the optimum performance design. From experimental characterization, it shows that the realized proposed antenna which consists of 7 blocks of interdigital capacitor structure with total dimension of 238.64mm (length) × 22mm (width) and fits 76mm diameter of experimental-rocket body resonates at frequency of 2.375GHz with gain and -10dB working bandwidth of -18.763dB and 13MHz, respectively.