Low-Cost Wind-Insensitive Ultrawideband Balloon Antenna for Seismic Telemetry Systems

This letter presents a low-cost wind-insensitive ultrawideband conformal balloon antenna for wireless seismic telemetry applications. The proposed design consists of conformal conductive strips attached on two balloon surfaces, a lightweight three-dimensional printed bi-conical feeding structure, and a third large balloon for shielding protection and buoyancy enhancement. Experimental characterization of a fabricated prototype has demonstrated the balloon antenna exhibiting low reflection coefficients, stable quasi-omnidirectional patterns, and flat realized gain over a very wide bandwidth from 103 to 384 MHz. A scaled propagation experiment based on the balloon antenna was performed under a weather condition with wind-force scale of four to five. The received power by a virtual seismic acquisition unit is almost independent of its azimuthal location, and a statistical probability of over 95% was achieved for the power variation less than 5 dB.