Abstract: In order to replace the solid metal antenna, a novel liquid metal conical helical antenna was presented. The antenna is easy to adjust its shape. The circularly polarized antenna has the characteristics of small size, high gain, wide bandwidth, and it is easy to reconstruct. Taking maritime satellite communications as an example, the proposed antenna was designed, simulated and optimized for antenna impedance matching with HFSS software, and a good circularly polarized radiation and impedance characteristics for the antenna were obtained. The simulated results show that: in the entire maritime satellite communication work band (1 525-1 660.5 MHz), the gain of the antenna achieves 8.5 dB; the 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth is 520 MHz. Comparing with the same size solid metal structure (copper), the novel antenna exceeds approximately 30 MHz. Therefore, under the premise of easy reconfiguration, the proposed liquid metal conical helical antenna achieves the performance of the solid metal antennas.

Key words: liquid metal, helical antenna, bandwidth, truncated structure