A Deployable Coplanar Waveguide CoCo Antenna

In this letter, a deployable coplanar waveguide (CPW) coaxial colinear (CoCo) antenna is proposed with full coverage in the H-plane. The antenna features an ultra-thin profile of only 0.1 mm with excellent deployability. The proposed antenna consists of eight units, which are connected through metal crossover lines. The top and bottom metal layers alternate as the inner and outer conductors of the CPW. Metal bridges are introduced to mitigate the open stopband (OSB) phenomenon, which also eliminates the undesired CPW slot mode. A planar choke is designed to eliminate the effects of unbalanced coaxial feeding, ensuring consistency between the measured and simulated results. The antenna was fabricated using flexible printed circuit (FPC) technology. Within the target 4.8 GHz to 4.9 GHz band, the measured S₁₁ is below −10 dB, and the efficiency is about 80%. The average gain in the H-plane is 5.8 dBi. The antenna shows great potential for applications in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other mobile communication devices.