Design and Realization of an Ultra-Wideband, Pattern-Stable Antenna for Ground Sensing Applications with UAVs

This paper focuses on the design of a lightweight antenna suitable for remote sensing applications aimed at the identification of buried objects from UAVs. The presented antenna structure is simple, lightweight, and allows for achieving a fractional bandwidth of nearly 100% with an excellent stability of the radiation pattern that exhibits minimal modification within the operating band of the antenna. Specifically, the stability of the phase center and the radiation pattern are critical factors for enabling synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing on moving platforms. We illustrate numerical simulations and measurements of an antenna prototype that validate the proposed approach.