Interdigital capacitor structure-based conformal traveling wave active antenna for experimental rocket communication

This paper deals with the development of conformal traveling wave active antenna based on interdigital capacitor structure for 2.35MHz communication between an experimental rocket and the ground station. The proposed active antenna which has the dimension of 238.64mm × 45mm consists of 7 blocks of interdigital capacitor structure as antenna radiators connected with 6 pairs of RF amplifier as active components. All the components of active antenna are deployed on an RT/Duroid® 6010LM dielectric substrate with the thickness of 0.127mm. The use of very thin dielectric substrate for antenna realization is aimed to have a conformable antenna which fits the cylindrical body of experimental rocket. After obtaining the optimum performance design, the proposed active antenna is then realized through wet etching technique for experimental characterization. As comparison, a conformal traveling wave passive antenna is simultaneously developed and realized on the same dielectric substrate with the dimension of of 238.64mm × 22mm. From the characterization result, it shows that the realized active antenna resonates at center frequency of 2.3625GHz with gain of -16.648dBi. This result is slightly different with the realized passive antenna which resonates at center frequency of 2.375GHz with gain of -18.763dBi.