The focus of this thesis is the design, manufacturing and testing of a deployable radio antenna for the ORCASat nanosatellite. First, the context, motivation, requirements, as well as constraints for this project are introduced. Next, a brief overview of theoretical concepts relevant to the contents of this thesis are presented. After the introduction of the relevant background and theory, a literature review is undertaken, and an experiment-based methodology is established. Prior to conceptualizing a new design, detailed consideration is also given to previous attempts at designing a dipole for ORCASat. The root cause of the problems with these attempts is determined experimentally as the presence of ground planes on the circuit board supporting the antenna. After this preliminary investigation, the blocks required for the ORCASat antenna are introduced as the transmission line feeder, the balun, the impedance matching block, and the antenna arm feed. For each of these components, competing design concepts are developed,
and the advantages and disadvantages of each of these concepts are presented. After this, the winning design concept is selected and developed into a manufacturable design. This design is identified as a tunable tape spring half wave dipole antenna featuring a specialized feed with electrically and mechanically optimal characteristics, no impedance matching, and a lossy choke balun wound from the coaxial cable feeder, all mounted on a circuit board in a pre-existing Delrin antenna deployer. Next, the manufacturing and assembly of this design is undertaken, followed by the consideration of an informal commissioning procedure. As part of this, a test article consisting of an incomplete prototype of the dipole is tested, and it is shown to have desirable voltage standing wave ratio, input impedance, and return loss characteristics, as well as excellent tunability. Having established that this test article is a good candidate to meet project requirements, it is updated to include as many of the final components of the antenna as possible. Then, formal test procedures for the verification of the tunability, return loss, VSWR, input impedance, antenna pattern, and absolute gain are established, and executed. Based on
the results of this formal verification test campaign, it is concluded that the test article meets the requirements presented at the beginning of this thesis, and it is suitable as a radio antenna for the ORCASat mission. After this, the work is concluded by a set of recommendations for future work to prepare the antenna developed in this thesis for flight. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/13717 |
| Date | 21 January 2022 |
| Creators | Buzas, Levente Imre |
| Contributors | Suleman, Afzal, Driessen, Peter F. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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