Investigation of Printed Meander-Line Bow-Tie Structures for GNSS Antenna Elements and Arrays with Planar-3D Integral Equation Methods

This contribution deals with the first design of an antenna element for the GPS-L1 frequency based on crossed dipoles with a meander-line bow-tie geometry leading to a high size reduction rate. The structure can be printed on a PCB together with other components leading to a cheap and robust fabrication. For the simulation of such structures, our planar-3D integral equation framework is very well suited with an own mesh generation and further enhanced quadrature strategies and redundancy reduction algorithms. SMD-elements for the matching circuit are incorporated as line impedances. First the admittance behavior of the dipole structure is derived to generate a circular polarization followed by a fine tuning of the combined structure to get minimum axial ratio. The element values of the matching circuit are determined with a particle swarm method which are further optimized by full simulations with the integrated matching network.