Substrate Material

[Talulah]

You can buy GPS patch antennas (Emtac comes to mind) where the patch is 20mm (nearly) square over a 4mm thick ceramic looking substrate. The dielectric constant must be around 20.

What is the dielectric material and where can you buy it (at reasonable cost)?

Can it be made (without great expertise) from powdered TiO2/Al2O3 and styrene resin?

Thanks in advance

 

[Higgler]

You don't need dielectric of 20 to make a quarter wave shorted patch antenna for GPS, so you might be misconstruing what is used. You only need a 3.5 dielectric if the patch is quarter wave shorted style to make one that's one inch long.

Most high dielectrics have high tolerances for their dielectric values and they are pretty expensive.

Emerson and Cuming makes some dielectrics castable at least up to Er=15, fairly expensive.

kch

 

[Comcokid]

Generally, the higher the dielectric value, the narrower the bandwidth of the resulting antenna.

Check the companies that make dielectric resonators, DRO ceramics, etc. Who to use also depends upon the application and the possible amount of material you may need. muRata and Panasonic (I believe) make the ceramics used in their products, but you would need tremendous volume to get their attention.