Low-Profile Antenna Package for Efficient Inter-CubeSat Communication in S- and V-band

Even space-borne deep space observation missions such as OLFAR require very large apertures (>10km). A CubeSat cluster is the only practical and affordable method of achieving such a large aperture in orbit, for the foreseeable future, but cannot be used until certain inter-CubeSat communication challenges are addressed. In this Paper, we review the challenges, focusing on the size limitations of CubeSats, but also on the radiofrequency allocation spectrum, and show that the 60GHz band is the best compromise, when high bandwidth is needed. So as to facilitate 60GHz inter-CubeSat communication, we propose a double V-band antenna design, expecting to reach more than 5GHz of bandwidth, a moderately high gain of 18dBi and a high efficiency (95%), using two orthogonal polarisations for the transmit and receive antennas. Each antenna is fixed as transmit or receive, only due to the 60 GHz chipset that is currently available to us. This antenna package is completed by an omnidirectional 2.4GHz-modified Planar Inverted F Antenna (PIFA) suitable for a reliable low-data-rate link over which channel management data can be exchanged. The full antenna package is readily integrable onto a 0.5U face of a CubeSat with a total thickness of 6.4mm. We evaluate the 60GHz link budget and expected performance of such a system, based on commercially available V-band transmitter and receiver modules.