Circularly Polarized Aperture-Coupled Microstrip Antenna for Nano-Satellites

In this paper, the design of an aperture-coupled microstrip antenna to be installed onto a nano-satellite is described. The proposed antenna has been optimized to operate at 2.26 GHz (S-Band), which is the operating frequency of the downlink channel of the Brazilian System for Meteorological Data Acquisition. The electromagnetic analysis is done by using HFSS software. For the design validation, prototypes were manufactured and the comparison between simulations and measurements indicates good performance of the proposed antenna.