Compact Top-Loaded Quarter-Cylinder Dielectric Resonator Antenna

Abstract This article presents the design of a top-loaded quartercylinder dielectric resonator antenna (TL-QCDRA). The approach to reduce the antenna dimensions is based on the use of E and H-walls to impose Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions to the fields inside the dielectric resonator. The proposed antenna was modeled and optimized with the electromagnetic simulator ANSYS HFSS and was designed to operate at 1.575 GHz (L1- band of the global positioning system - GPS). The excitation is achieved by a coaxial probe along with a series inductor, whichis used to compensate the capacitive input reactance. A prototype was manufactured and measured in an anechoic chamber and good agreement was obtained between numerical and experimental results. In comparison to previously published papers, the proposed design yields higher compactness, which is an important feature for space applications.