Microwave radars can be used to monitor the internal structure of the snowpack, delivering real-time and non-destructive measurements. Recently, the working principle of an innovative radar architecture able to identify some of the most important snowpack parameters, without external aids, has been demonstrated. A key point of this new architecture is the use of two independent receiving antennas, and one transmitting antenna. This paper presents a comparison between two different implementations, either based on one physical antenna miming two receiving antennas, or based directly on two physical receiving antennas. The different advantages and disadvantages of both solutions are discussed, highlighting the superior accuracy achieved by the implementation based on two physical receiving antennas. Then, this paper also presents the field results achieved by this type of radar architecture, on the grounds of a 5-day experimental campaign that took place in winter 2019 in the Italian Alps on dry snow. The comparison between the radar measurements and the ground truth (manual snowpit analysis, in terms of snowpack depth, dielectric constant, bulk density, and snow water equivalent) is provided. Overall, a root mean square error of around 3.5 cm, 0.05, 27 kg/m3, and 2.5 cm is achieved, respectively.

This paper presents the design of a sixth-order cross-coupled L-band filter, specifically intended for space applications. The solution was based on the principle of stepped impedance coaxial resonators (SIRs), which allowed us to fulfill several electrical and size specifications and more particularly a high multipactor threshold. The degrees of freedom afforded by the proposed topology offer a wide choice of design configuration possibilities. Whatever the central frequency and required specifications, several compromises can be made in terms of volume, height, footprint, quality factor, multipactor threshold, harmonic rejection, etc. For instance, SIR coaxial topology is very well suited to small L-band filters when moderate quality factors and multipactor thresholds of around 4000 and 400 W, respectively, are requested. The design procedure is presented and simulations and measurements are compared and discussed.

This paper presents a simple reconfigurable bandpass filter switching from 2.4 to 5 GHz based on PIN diodes. The proposed filter is intended to add frequency-tunability to antenna systems used in cognitive radio applications. It consists of a bent connecting stub with two open-circuited quarter-wave stubs grounded via PIN diodes. By controlling the didoes states, the electrical length of the stubs can be switched from quarter-wave to half-wave and vice versa, so as to tune the filter center frequency. The proposed design approach consists of ensuring communication at 2.4 GHz while blocking the 5 GHz band in the ON state, whereas in the OFF state, the filter is intended to reject the 2.4 GHz band and passing the 5 GHz band. A prototype of the proposed filter is fabricated and measured to validate the proposed concept. Both simulated and measured results show a two-state filter with a wide tuning range from 2.4 to 5 GHz and a good stopband rejection level better than 40 dB. Moreover, a flat group delay of about 0.55–0.7 ns is achieved within the operating bandwidth in both states. The proposed filter is able to achieve simultaneous bandwidth and frequency control, showing an important tool to meet modern system requirements.

This paper presents a feasibility study for the implementation of a concurrent dual-band power amplifier (PA) design suitable for 1.98 GHz WCDMA and 3.42 GHz WiMAX digital systems. The proposed PA design was compared with a test bed based on a pair of dedicated single-frequency band PAs. The dual-band PA exhibited simultaneous peak output power levels of 24 and 17 dBm in the lower and in the higher bands to maintain ACPR and EVM requirements below 33 dBc and 5%, respectively. The conclusions drawn in the paper justify the design effort of this innovative solution, which is capable of increasing the PAE for concurrent dual-band operation maintaining the performance of more conventional solutions.

A new planar microstrip-fed monopole ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna with dual notched bands has been presented. By employing a simple dual-mode resonator with two symmetrical outer high-impedance lines beside the microstrip feed line of the proposed UWB antenna, two controllable rejection bands with high-frequency selectivity are created. The parametric studies of the proposed structure are explored for the dual band-notched operating mechanism. Finally, the experimental results, including return losses, radiation patterns, and peak gains are shown, declaring that the proposed antenna has good impedance matching performance and radiation pattern properties.

In this paper, we designed and developed a novel internal compact printed loop antenna for WWAN/WLAN/ISM/LTE smartphone applications. The proposed antenna is composed of a meander loop antenna and a capacitively coupled feeding line. It has a planar structure, with an overall dimension of 120 × 60 mm2, the antenna portion occupying a size of 20 × 60 mm2, which makes it suitable for practical smartphone applications. The results of our measurement reveal that the prototype antenna can provide two wide frequency bands of 712–1078 and 1757–2930 MHz, which cover multi-band for GSM850/GSM900/DCS1800/PCS1900/UMTS2100/IMT2000/WLAN2400/ISM2450/LTE700/LTE2300/ LTE2500. The antenna also shows good radiation characteristics and gain peaks for frequencies over the desired operating bands. We also studied the specific absorption rate (SAR) of the proposed antenna placed at the bottom of a mobile phone. The obtained SAR values are all below the SAR limit of 1.6 W/kg for the 1 g head tissue and 2.0 W/kg for the 10 g head tissue. We used CST Microwave Studio and Ansoft HFSS for the simulation and the design of the antenna and present in this paper the details of the design considerations, as well as the results on the reflection coefficient, the surface current distributions, the radiation characteristics, and the gain of the proposed antenna.

The demanding tasks for automotive radar systems in multitarget scenarios require an increased target separation performance and new sensor concepts. In this contribution, a highly integrated 77 GHz time domain multiplex (TDM) MIMO radar is presented. The sensor is feasible for advanced direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in azimuth and elevation. For efficient and high-quality measurements a fractional-n phased locked loop (PLL) with integrated waveform generator, enabling chirp and frequency modulated continous waveform (FMCW) modulations, is implemented. Spatial beamforming is done with series feed array patch antennas in combination with a dielectric cylindrical lens. For the improvement of the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performance a new lens-based MIMO radar approach is introduced. Therefore the classical MIMO approach is combined with the advantages of an optical beamforming concept. Due to the usage of these techniques the sensor performance in accuracy, ambiguity suppression, and angular resolution can be significantly increased.

A modified H-shaped metamaterial is imparted in this paper that has a multiple band coverage for reflection and transmission coefficient. The proposed structure exhibits triple band coverage for the permittivity and permeability. Two split ring resonators (SRR) are connected with the substantial H-shaped structure. The 12 × 12 mm2 structure has been printed on FR-4 and a correlation is made between the basic unit-cell and array structures. A comparison is made among 1 × 2, 2 × 2, and 4 × 4 array structures with 1 × 2, 2 × 2, and 4 × 4 unit-cell configurations to validate the performance of the proposed metamaterial. A great transmission coefficient having a band of 13 GHz with a 500 MHz band gap in the middle is demonstrated for all of these configurations. The effective parameters of the resonators cover C, X, and Ku bands independently with double-negative phenomena at X and Ku bands with a frequency range of about 2.5 GHz. The reflection and transmission coefficients of the unit cell are obtained by CST microwave studio. Having an auspicious design and wide range double-negative characteristics, this structure can be applied to satellite communication.

A mode converter design using the concept of periodic substrates loading in a circular waveguide, to convert TM01 mode to TE11 mode is presented in this paper. The detailed design principle, simulation, and measurement results are included in this study. Simulation results show that the purity of output fundamental TE11 mode of the converter approaches 99.2% for an operating frequency of 3.2 GHz. The mode conversion efficiency is more than 90% over 3.07–3.25 GHz band and the relative bandwidth is 5.6% (180 MHz). The proposed TM01–TE11 mode converter has advantages, such as the compact, lightweight structure, high conversion efficiency, and proper bandwidth. The fabrication cost is relatively low and the structure is easy to fabricate. The power-handling capability is limited to 10 MW due to dielectric-based design. The compactness and portability of the system (e.g. Space applications, Accelerators, High Power Microwave) can be improved significantly using the proposed mode converter.

A recently developed material based on carbon nanotubes is used here for the realization of single- and double-layered frequency-selective surfaces (FSSs) with relevant absorbing properties. The peculiar characteristics of carbon nanotubes are exploited to devise high-loss resonant ring structures periodically arranged to build the FSS. By introducing two layers of rings, an absorber with stable characteristics over a wide frequency band and over a wide range for the incident wave angle is achieved.

In this paper, the use of regularization methods to solve the location problem in multilateration systems, using Mode-S signals, is studied, evaluated, and developed. The Tikhonov method has been implemented as a first application to solve the classical system of hyperbolic equations in multilateration systems. Some simulations are obtained and the results are compared with those obtained by the well-established Taylor linearization and with the Cramér–Rao lower bound analysis. Significant improvements, for the accuracy, convergence, and the probability of location, are found for the application of the Tikhonov method.

A passive evanescent mode half-mode substrate integrated waveguide (HMSIW) resonator loaded with a complementary split ring resonator (CSRR) is designed and fabricated for humidity sensing applications. The use of the CSRR which is etched on the top plane of the HMSIW can significantly reduce the size of the device. Without any sensing material, the sensor which has a compact size of 0.17λg × 0.17λg can provide high humidity sensitivity up to 5.82 MHz/%relative humidity (RH) at high RH region (>84.3%). The results indicate that the proposed structure is a promising candidate for radio and microwave humidity sensing applications.

In this paper a monostatic frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar system around a center frequency of 24 GHz with a wide tuning range of 8 GHz (≈33%) is presented. It is based on a fully integrated single-channel SiGe transceiver chip. The chip architecture consists of a fundamental VCO, a receive mixer, a divider chain, and coupling/matching networks. All circuits, except for the divider, are designed with the extensive use of on-chip monolithic integrated spiral inductors. The chip is fabricated in a SiGe bipolar production technology which offers an fT of 170 GHz and fmax of 250 GHz. The phase noise at 1 MHz offset is better than −100 dBc/Hz over the full-tuning range of 8 GHz and a phase noise of better than −111 dBc/Hz is achieved at 27 GHz. The peak output power of the chip is −1 dBm while the receive mixer offers a 1 dBm input referred compression point to keep it from being saturated. The chip has a power consumption of 245 mW and uses an area of 1.51 mm2. The FMCW radar system achieves a power consumption below 1.6 W. Owing to the high stability of the sensor, high accuracy mesaurements with a range error <±250 µm were achieved. The standard deviation between repeated measurements of the same target is 0.6 µm and the spatial resolution is 28 mm.

The μ-negative metamaterial (MNG) two-element MIMO antenna design was proposed in this article for WiMAX (2.5–2.8 GHz), WLAN (3.2–5.9 GHz), and ITU band (8.15−8.25 GHz) applications. The first design of the MIMO antenna operates at 2.7 and 4.9 GHz frequencies. In order to reduce the mutual coupling, a defective ground structure is used. For further isolation improvement, an MNG unit cell is placed in between the two radiating elements at a distance of 10 mm. The designed antenna elements have better than −23 dB coupling isolation between the two radiating elements. Moreover, with MNG an additional frequency of 8.2 GHz is obtained, which is useful for ITU band applications. The proposed antenna bandwidth is expanded by 19% in the lower operational band, 20% in the second operational band, and 32% in the higher frequency band with the MNG unit cell. From the analysis, the proposed antenna is suitable for WiMAX/WLAN/ITU band applications because of its low enveloped correlation coefficient, and highest directive gain and low mutual coupling between the radiating components. The proposed antenna was simulated, fabricated, and measured with the help of the Schwarz ZVL vector network analyzer and anechoic chamber. Both measured and simulated results are highly accurate and highly recommended for WiMAX/WLAN/ITU bands.

This paper presents the behavior of three iterations of a coplanar waveguide fed CANTOR Set fractal antenna. This kind of antennas allows having a broadband behavior and important gains. Also, the setup of slots allows having more lower resonant frequencies and therefore designing miniaturized antennas with good performances. The proposed antennas are suitable for 2.5/3.3/5/5.5 GHz worldwide interoperability for microwave access and for 2.4–2.5/4.9–5.9 GHz wireless local area networks applications. The simulations were performed in FEKO 6.3. The measurements were performed with Vector Network Analyzer HP 8719C.

In designing a Foreign Object Debris (FOD) detection system on airport runways, this paper deals with the performance of a 77 GHz reflectarray antenna (RA). Debris may be very small and have low radar cross section (RCS), leading to design a high gain primary-fed offset RA. To minimize the aperture blockage, the main radiation lobe is in the specular direction. The antenna has a maximum gain of 40 dBi and aperture efficiency of 50% over the frequency band 76–77 GHz. First measurements using a 77 GHz radar module were carried out on pavement.

Two new designs of the L-shaped Planar Inverted–F Antenna (PIFA) antennas with single and dual polarization operating at the frequency band for IEEE 802.11b/g standard with satisfactory radiation characteristics are presented. We further propose a genetic algorithm (GA) embedded in CST Microwave Studio for optimizing these antenna parameters. The agreement of simulation and measurement results shows the performance of our joint model. Also, they show that our dual-polarization antenna is suitable for indoor Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) wireless environment applications.

This paper presents a simple and compact coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed circular-shaped reconfigurable patch antenna with a switchable circular polarization (CP) sense. The circular patch is cut at the ends vertically and switches are introduced to connect the patch ends. By controlling the ON/OFF status of the two switches, the polarization of the antenna can be switched between two states: left-hand circular polarization and right-hand circular polarization. The patch is designed on a very thin RT Duroid substrate of dielectric constant (εr) of 2.2 and thickness of 0.254 mm. The overall antenna dimensions are 35 × 30 mm. The antenna is designed and simulated using finite-element method -based EM simulator, HFSS. For each switching condition the return loss curve, radiation pattern are obtained. Axial ratio curves for polarization diversity cases are also plotted. Parametric studies have been made in order to get optimized values for certain antenna dimensions such as thickness, CPW ground to feed gap, etc.

A flexible and adaptive energy-efficient high-speed wireless hub is developed in polymer foil as a Hybrid System-in-Foil (HySiF) using Chip-Film Patch (CFP) technology. In this matter, the SiGe BiCMOS silicon chips (2.39 × 1.65 mm2) are thinned down to 45 μm and are embedded face-up inside a two-polymer CFP carrier. The active pads of the embedded silicon chips inside foil are extended to the surface of the foil to interconnect to the antenna on the foil. The integrated hybrid system has a signal transmission at 5–6 GHz frequency band. The overall thickness of the system is below 100 μm and its bendability is down to 4 mm radius of curvature. The designed and fabricated PA silicon chips operate at 50 mA with a 1.5 V supply voltage. Therefore, in addition to the high lateral thermal resistance of the thinned chip, self-heating loop inside polymer due to the low thermal conductivity of the embedding polymer raises the system temperature. Consequently, the thermal behavior and RF performance of the PA chip under different conditions are investigated. Moreover, the antenna with the required carrier frequency is simulated, fabricated, and measured on top of the polymer foil as a stand-alone system in the flexible CFP.

In this research article, a metasurface (MTS)-loaded high-gain and broadband circularly polarized (CP) monopole antenna is reported. The proposed antenna configuration consists of a symmetric Y-shaped radiating monopole over a partial ground plane with extended twin parasitic conducting strips (PCS) loaded with a MTS reflector. To achieve left-hand circular polarization characteristics, a metallic copper strip is utilized to short the partial ground plane with one of the twin PCS [PCS(L)]. By using the grid-slotted sub patches on a rectangular MTS a reflector of 2λfa × 1.65λfa × 0.02λfa is placed just below the monopole radiator at a height of 0.33λfa, which provides broadened impedance (IBW) and 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth (ARBW) responses with high gain. The proposed prototype with an volumetric dimension of 1.33λfa × 0.9λfa × 0.02λfa at fa = 5 GHz is designed and characterized. It exhibits a measured IBW of 48.45% (3.57–5.89 GHz), ARBW of 25.25% (4.21–5.42 GHz), and CP gain of > 8.35 dBic with the antenna efficiency of > 75% in the desired operating frequency bands. The obtained performances of the proposed MTS antenna confirm its suitability for RF energy harvesting application.