Found this unclassified test document. Luneburg lens Antenna weighs about 30 pounds works at 20 ghz Can it be down sized using lighter plastic / foam? At 2.4 ghz lower frequency would require a much larger dome We could use 5.8 for video down link maybe but, weight is a killer for our small UAV's.
That's an interesting concept, but it'd be a challenge for an amateur to build. On the ground, Yagis and dishes are easier to fabricate and tune, and in the air, we're pretty much stuck with dipoles (and sometimes 1/4 wave whips, which end up acting like crummy dipoles...) Any kind of directional antenna in the air is going to be a challenge due to size and weight constraints. I have thought about switching a couple of dipoles with PIN diodes, but I haven't really dug into how one might mount them to reliably avoid cross-polarization and nulls. A turnstile might be better, accepting the circular polarization at high angles, but there's still the mounting issue. The Luneberg would need some kind of a tracking feedhorn, integrated with the AHRS so it knows which way to point.
Do you know of any examples of someone selling an inexpensive example of this type of antenna, or any articles on fabricating them? Getting the right plastic foams would seem to be the hardest problem.
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Do you know of any examples of someone selling an inexpensive example of this type of antenna, or any articles on fabricating them? Getting the right plastic foams would seem to be the hardest problem.
But i don't really know much about it, but i would think it would be pretty hard to make, or expensive