Microstrip Antenna with Extended Ground Plane for Meteorological Nano-Satellites

This paper presents the study of a microstrip antenna to be installed onto meteorological nano-satellit es. In order to increase the effective ground plane and to optimize the decoupling between the main and the cross polarizations, me tallic strips were attached to the antenna ground plane. The antenn a performance was evaluated using different types and sizes o f metallic strips. An improvement in the front-to-back ratio whilst keeping good axial ratio performance was observed.