A switch-beam circular array antenna using pattern reconfigurable Yagi-Uda antenna for space communications

This paper presents a switch-beam circular array antenna using pattern reconfigurable Yagi-Uda antenna. A two-beam switching Yagi-Uda antenna is applied as an array element. The 3-element circular array is introduced to be able to switch the main beam in azimuth direction by switching the beam and shifting the excitation phase of array elements. The array antenna is designed at 2.4 GHz for drone or UAV radio controlling. The two-beam elements and 90°-shifted phase of excitation are applied to realize the proposed switched-beam array antenna. The simulated results show that the array antenna can provide 7 main beam directions covering a half azimuth plane (0° ≤ φ ≤ 180°) and gain of the array antenna is higher than 7 dBi.