Low cost antennas for MSAT vehicular applications

For Mobile MSAT applications a number of vehicular antennas have been developed that meet the program requirements. They are, however, costly to manufacture. Two antenna candidates are described here that provide adequate gain in the coverage zone and are also lower cost. One is the mast antenna that uses three or four element arrays of aquadrifilar helices. It generates omnidirectional pattern in azimuth and its beam is scanned in elevation. The second unit is a planar spiral antenna; it generates directional beams by a summation of the azimuthal modes. A variation of this antenna uses conical spirals to fulfill the same task. In both cases beam scanning is achieved by means of electronic switches rather than phase shifters, thus resulting in simpler configurations.