Designing and Testing a PCB Wideband Spiral Antenna

Back in January we posted about a Vivaldi antenna project by "hexandflex". In that project he showed how he designed and manufactured the Vivaldi. A Vivaldi antenna is wideband and directional and the design works well for frequencies above 800 MHz, but becomes too physically large to handle for lower frequencies like 400 MHz. In his latest project, hexandflex has designed a PCB based spiral antenna to cover these lower frequencies.

Hexandflex's post is split into three parts. The first post introduces us to his motivation and talks about what spiral antennas are. The second post discusses the modelling and simulation of the antenna with OpenEMS. OpenEMS is a free front end for MATLAB or Octave which allows you to simulate antenna parameters such as impedance and radiation pattern. Finally in the third post the real world parameters of the antenna are determined in an anechoic chamber owned by Antenna Test Lab, a professional antenna testing agency.

Hexandflex is currently selling his spiral antennas over on Tindie. There are two versions, one smaller one costing $32 designed for 800 MHz+ and a larger one costing $42 designed for 300 MHz+. Both come with suction cups that allow for easy window mounting.