Advanced antennas for air vehicle flight test evaluation. Navy SBIR FY2009.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2009.1 Topic No.: N091-041 Topic Title: Advanced antennas for air vehicle flight test evaluation. Proposal No.: N091-041-1326 Firm: Rock West Solutions, Inc. 8666 Commerce Avenue San Diego, California 92121 Contact: Keith Loss Phone: (858) 568-8057 Web Site: www.rockwest-solutions.com Abstract: When flight testing missiles and other high performance vehicles, flight instrumentation antennas are required to support telemetry, data link, flight termination systems (flight safety), and tracking beacons. Integration of these antennas onto the test missiles creates challenges with respect to modifying their aerodynamic characteristics (drag) and radar cross section (RCS). Rock West Solution proposes new, advanced technology, low profile and conformal antennas made from materials that can withstand the high temperatures of high speed vehicles. These antennas can be configured to provide similar gain and pattern characteristics as their commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) counterparts, while have significantly lower impacts on drag and RCS. Our proposed concepts include antennas that can be easily adapted to curved contours of aerodynamic bodies. Bolt-on and bonded antennas are investigated, with the primary trade-offs being between integration complexity, cost and performance. Benefits: Our low profile antennas will be low cost, easily integrated, and have excellent RF performance and low RCS characteristics. Our conformal, aperture coupled antennas, will have essentially no additional drag, and little or negligible impact on RCS (the impact to RCS is relative to the RCS of the operational vehicle). Some of the antenna concepts are highly adaptable to complex contoured body shapes, with the only new complexity being the integration of the antenna electronics within the missile structure (which would be incurred for the test configuration, regardless). This family of antennas also shows great promise for operational vehicles, such as large and mid size UAVs, for both military and civilian use. These flight vehicles can gain additional or redundant communication channels for essentially no additional drag, thereby incurring no penalty to flight endurance, and negligible impact to RCS or detectability. Return