The effectiveness of radar interferometric techniques in non-urban areas can often be compromised due to the lack of stable natural targets. This drawback can be partially compensated through the installation of reference targets, characterized by a bright and stable radar response. The installation of passive corner reflectors (PCR) often represents a valid aid, but these objects are usually cumbersome, and suffer from severe weather conditions; furthermore, the installation of a PCR can be difficult and costly, especially in places with hard accessibility. Active reflectors (AR) represent a less cumbersome alternative to PCRs, while still providing a stable phase response. This paper describes the design, implementation, and test of an AR prototype, designed to operate with the Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR), aimed at providing a fair performance/cost benefit. These characteristics, obtained through a tradeoff between the use of off-the-shelf components and a simple architecture, can make the setup of a dense network (i.e., tens of devices) in the monitored areas feasible. The paper reports the design, implementation, and the analysis of different tests carried out in a laboratory, and in a real condition in the field, to illustrate AR reliability and estimate its phase stability.

This paper presents a novel approach for tuning substrate integrated waveguide resonators, realized by placing an additional metallized via-hole on the waveguide cavity. The approach presented here can be applied as a trimming technique, as well as to develop filter designs with tunable center frequencies and tunable bandwidths. Three different filters are designed and implemented, demonstrating excellent trimming, 10% tuning of the center frequency, and 100% tuning of the bandwidth, respectively.

A compact diplexer is implemented in Low‐Temperature‐Cofired‐Ceramic (LTCC) technology and consists of six coupled substrate‐integrated‐waveguide (SIW) cavity resonators stacked in two layers. No transmission‐line based junction is used. The couplings between the cavities are achieved through both SIW irises and slots placed in metal layers. The diplexer has two third‐order filtering channels, centred at 2.7 and 3.3 GHz with 120 MHz bandwidths. The overall size of the diplexer is 27.74 mm (2.3 λ _g at 3 GHz) × 10.4 mm (0.86 λ _g at 3 GHz) × 0.84 mm, achieved by using an LTCC material of a high dielectric constant of 68. Simulations and measurements are in good agreement to demonstrate a compact diplexer based on an all‐resonator structure using high dielectric constant LTCC material.

UAV assisted wireless sensor networks play a key role in the detection of toxic gases and aerosols. UAVs can be used to remotely deploy sensor nodes and then collect gas concentration readings and GPS positioning from them to delimit an affected area. For such purpose, a dual-band communication system is required, supporting GPS reception, and sensor reading data transfer, which is chosen to be at 2.4 GHz using LoRa physical layer. In this work we propose a switched-beam antenna subsystem for the sensor nodes capable not only of satisfying the dual band requirements but also of maximizing communication range or energy consumption through a good antenna polarization match and improved antenna gain. This antenna subsystem is built using dual-port, dual-band, circularly polarized antenna elements, whose design and experimental validation is carefully detailed. A low profile microstrip stacked structure has been used to obtain return loss in both bands better than 15 dB, axial ratios below 1.5 dB, and wide −3 dB beamwidths around 90° and 75° for GPS and 2.4 GHz bands, respectively, thus limiting the gain reduction of the switched-beam system in critical sensor orientations. Special attention has been paid to reduce the coupling between both ports through the optimization of the relative placement of both patches and their feeding points. The measured coupling is below −30 dB.

[1] A very efficient technique for the full-wave analysis and design of complex passive waveguide filters, including rectangular cavities with metallic cylindrical posts and coaxial excitation, is presented. This novel technique provides the wideband generalized admittance matrix representation of the whole structure in the form of pole expansions, thus extracting the most expensive computations from the frequency loop. For this purpose, the structure is properly segmented into its key building blocks, all of them characterized in terms of wideband admittance matrices. Then, an efficient iterative algorithm for combining these matrices, and finally providing the wideband generalized admittance matrix of the complete structure, is followed. In order to validate the accuracy and efficiency of this full-wave modal technique, four different waveguide filters have been considered. In particular, the design of a compact four-pole in-line filter with tuning screws and of an evanescent-mode filter, both operating in the X-band and including a standard (vertical) coaxial excitation, are first presented. Finally, two C-band six-resonator comb-line filters, one of them with a cross-coupling configuration, and both excited with a collinear end-launcher transition based on a disc-ended coaxial, are also designed. Numerical data from a commercial software, as well as measurements of a manufactured prototype, are included for verification purposes.

An efficient full-wave method based on the 3D BI-RME (boundary integral-resonant mode expansion) technique for the accurate design of generalized probe-excited rectangular waveguides is presented. The flexibility of the developed CAD tool allows to analyze two common configurations frequently used in modern coaxial-fed microwave devices: conventional and disc-ended coaxial probe excitation. This last configuration is used to drastically improve the electrical response of the classical coaxial probe excitation. Moreover, the influence of the distance from the probe to the waveguide shortcircuit is also discussed, and it is shown that it plays a very important role in the design of probe-excited rectangular waveguides. The proposed approach is fully validated by comparing the obtained numerical results with theoretical and experimental data extracted from the available technical literature