Cylindrical: an effective CAD package to design probe-fed rectangular microstrip antennas conformed onto cylindrical structures

This paper presents a computer aided design tool named Cylindrical. The algorithm utilizes the cavity model to design and analyze linearly and circularly polarized probe-fed rectangular microstrip antennas conformed on cylindrical structures. Firstly, a brief description of the program is given. Then, Cylindrical has been used to design a circularly polarized antenna to operate at the L1 band of GPS. Validation was further done with the Ansoft HFSS package. It has been shown that the antenna dimensions given by the design algorithm of Cylindrical needed to be only slightly changed in order to obtain an optimized circularly polarized radiator according to the HFSS software. The tool is also very suitable for teaching graduate courses on microstrip antennas