A. El Hajj

A reconfigurable/deployable helical antenna for small satellites

In this paper a helical antenna that is deployed on a small satellite platform is presented. The antenna achieves reconfiguration in stages by deploying in and out of the satellite in a rotational matter to achieve frequency tuning. The antenna is circularly polarized with a wide bandwidth and a reasonable gain. The merging of deployable and reconfigurable antennas allows deployment on demand and adds more capabilities and adaptation ability to space communications.

Complexity reduction of a reconfigurable U-Koch microstrip antenna using graph models

Reconfigurable antennas are divided into two categories: Multi-part antennas and single-part antennas. A multi-part antenna is composed of an array of identical or different elements (triangular, rectangular, etc…) [1] where a single-part antenna is composed of one part with electronic components bridging over slots that are incorporated in its structure. Many designers resort to different electronic components such as RF MEMS [2], capacitors [3], or other elements to achieve the reconfiguration of their antenna systems. The incorporation of electronic components on an antenna structure increases its complexity [1] and decreases the feasibility of its reconfiguration. An approach based on graph models is developed in [1] to investigate a multi-part antenna and remove the redundancy from its topology. In this paper, another approach based on graph models is used to study a single part antenna previously designed in [4]. The redundant switches are removed and the antenna is redesigned with a much lower complexity to achieve the same desired performance.