Design of a double-faced glass-integrated antenna for military aircraft FM radio communication

Abstract

This paper proposes a double-faced glass-integrated antenna for military FM radio communication on aircraft. The proposed antenna, consisting of a feed, a parallel strip, and a radiator, uses both sides of the window. The feed strip and the parallel strip are directly printed on the inner surface, while the radiator is printed on a thin transparent film to be placed on the outer surface. This allows the antenna characteristic to be replaced by changing the radiator without replacing the entire window. A multi-loop structure is adopted for the radiator, and the parallel strip is applied to broaden the coupling bandwidth. The proposed antenna is optimized by a genetic algorithm in conjunction with the FEKO EM simulator. The optimized antenna shows a half power matching bandwidth of 31% and an average azimuth gain of about 3.75 dBi. The results show that the proposed antenna can be adopted as a military FM antenna for aircraft applications. © 2011 IEEE.