Antennas for the Long Distance Communication System for Unmanned Air Vehicle of the Brazilian Air Force
UAV, Antennas, S-Band, VHF.
The CLBI (Barreira do Inferno Launch Center) is a unit of the Brazilian Aeronautics Command that launches suborbital rockets whose impact points on the sea occur in previously prohibited areas. Because vessels invade these areas, Ministry of Defense planes, ships and helicopters and CLBI radars need to make incursions to keep these vessels away, thus avoiding risks to the lives and assets of third parties. To reduce the costs of this logistics, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) of the Penguin B type were acquired to replace the aircraft and ships in these missions. The Air Force Command, through CLBI and its Prospecting and Development Section (SPD), requested that a long-distance communication system be developed for these UAVs, with a range of up to 110 km, motivated by the fact that do not exist links with these characteristics, sold separately from an UAV and its
respective control station, whose prices were unfeasible for CLBI. As part of the SPD’s mission, the objective of this work is to propose a link structure that allows the control of these UAVs and the reception of data in the mentioned distances. For this, four antennas were designed and tested, two for the uplink and two for the downlink, whose characteristics of gain, irradiation lobe, weight and aerodynamic drag provide the viability of this link .