Miniaturization and lightweight design of GNSS navigation anti-interference antenna
Miniaturization and lightweight design of GNSS anti-jamming antennas have emerged as a core technical direction to meet the growing demand for compact navigation terminals across aerospace, portable surveying, and unmanned system applications. These design efforts focus on reducing overall size and mass without compromising core anti-jamming performance, a balance that requires targeted optimization across material selection, structural layout, and electromagnetic performance tuning.
Core Principles for Size and Weight Reduction in Radiation Elements
Traditional GNSS anti-jamming antenna radiation elements often rely on full-size microstrip patches that occupy large planar space, which creates a bottleneck for further size reduction. Modern miniaturized designs adopt stacked multi-layer patch structures, where upper and lower radiation units are connected through metal vias to enhance inter-layer electromagnetic coupling. This structure introduces additional resonant modes without expanding the overall planar footprint, effectively extending the working bandwidth while cutting the single radiation element size to less than 20% of the wavelength at the lowest operating frequency. This approach avoids the performance degradation that often comes with simple slot loading, and maintains stable right-hand circular polarization characteristics across all target GNSS frequency bands.
Carefully tuned perturbation structures are embedded on the surface of the radiation patch to adjust the amplitude and phase relationship of orthogonal polarization modes, ensuring that the 3dB axial ratio bandwidth can still cover all mainstream GNSS frequency points even after the element size is significantly reduced. Low-profile design techniques further limit the total height of the radiation layer to no more than 10mm, eliminating the bulky protruding structures found in traditional anti-jamming antennas. This low-profile layout not only reduces the overall mass of the antenna, but also lowers wind resistance when deployed on high-speed moving platforms.
Material and Structural Optimization for Lightweight Performance
The selection of high-performance lightweight dielectric substrates forms the foundation of the entire design system. Modern designs use high-strength, low-density composite dielectric materials with precisely controlled dielectric constants, which can reduce the thickness of the substrate by more than 40% compared to traditional FR4 materials while maintaining consistent electromagnetic wave transmission efficiency. These materials also have excellent temperature stability, ensuring that the antenna’s electrical performance does not drift significantly across a wide operating temperature range from -40°C to +85°C.
The internal metal structural parts of the antenna adopt hollow-out design and integrated forming process, which removes redundant material areas that do not participate in electromagnetic conduction or structural support. The traditional thick solid metal ground plate is replaced by a lightweight periodic electromagnetic structure that maintains the same current distribution characteristics, cutting the total mass of the ground plate by more than 60% without weakening its ability to suppress back-lobe interference. The outer protective shell uses high-strength engineering polymer materials with electromagnetic transparency, which provides sufficient environmental protection performance against water, dust and corrosion while adding very little extra mass.
System Level Integration to Preserve Anti-Jamming Capability
The miniaturized array layout of multi-antenna elements follows the principle of spatial orthogonality, arranging each radiation unit at a reasonable spacing that avoids mutual coupling interference between adjacent elements. This optimized layout ensures that the adaptive spatial filtering algorithm can still form independent deep nulls for multiple jamming sources, even when the total array aperture is significantly reduced. The RF front-end circuit is highly integrated into a single compact chip, which combines low-noise amplification, filtering and analog-to-digital conversion functions on the same die, eliminating the large number of discrete components that previously occupied valuable internal space.
The phase consistency calibration technology for miniaturized arrays compensates for the tiny amplitude and phase errors introduced by the compact layout, ensuring that the beamforming performance of the antenna system remains fully compliant with industry standards. This system-level optimization allows the miniaturized lightweight anti-jamming antenna to maintain the same interference suppression capability as traditional large-size products, while being fully compatible with the strict space and weight constraints of small unmanned platforms, portable navigation devices and other compact application scenarios.
