Beam steering antenna with reconfigurable parasitic elements for FPV drone applications

Abstract

A beam steering antenna for first person view (FPV) drone communication applications is proposed. The proposed antenna consists of a driven monopole antenna at the center of an equilateral triangle structure with reconfigurable parasitic elements. All parasitic elements are composed of a metallic strip with a PIN diode loaded in the middle of each strip. Depending on the on/off state of each diode, the parasitic element can act as an opaque or transparent surface to a vertically polarized incident wave. Therefore, beam steering properties of the proposed antenna can be achieved by changing the states of the PIN diodes. The measured results were in good agreement with the simulated results and demonstrated that the proposed antenna could be used for 5.8GHz ISM band FPV applications.