2011 SuperDARN Workshop
ABSTRACTS
Impedance matching for SuperDARN antennas: An improved technique
E. Custovic, D. Elton, J. Devlin, J. Whittington and A. Console
Department of Electronic Engineering, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia
abstract. In recent years we have witnessed the development of the Twin Terminated Folded Dipole (TTFD) antenna which has replaced the deployment of the bulky LPDA [1]. Never the less, the TTFD has been a work in progress and the SuperDARN community is continually optimising the original design to extract maximum performance characteristics [2].
It is evident that the TTFD antenna impedance varies heavily with frequency and in a linear array arrangement antennas near the end of the array will have a different impedance due to its surrounding environment. Also, current SuperDARN radars with TTFD antennas utilise toroids for impedance matching which can be quiet lossy and are not easily tweaked for the desired impedance. Therefore, for maximum performance, each antenna impedance must be individually tweaked using a matching LCR network.
With our research and development we would like to present an improved antenna matching technique.
References:
[1] Custovic, E., Devlin, J., Whittington, J., Console, A., Three-wire Twin Terminated Folded Dipole array for SuperDARN Radars, Proceedings of 12th Australian Symposium on Antennas, pp 33-34, Sydney, Australia, 16 - 17 Feb. 2011
[2] Custovic, E., and Console, A. TTFD Array Variations for TIGER 3, International SuperDARN Conference, Proceedings, Hermanus, South Africa, June 2010