| This project designed an antenna that can be embedded in soil that could both sense the moisture content of the soil, and communicate this information to a remote base station. The antenna transmits information about the moisture content of the soil to the microcontroller that either turns on or off a sprinkler or irrigation system. For sensing, maximum change in resonant frequency or gain was desired. For communication, minimum change and optimal gain was required. This project builds on previous work that developed designs for antennas that would either sense or communicate when buried within lossy dielectric media. The antenna is the largest component within both the sensing and communication systems. The new technology in this thesis is the integration of the two antennas (both microstrip designs), a full study of how the parameters of several antenna designs affect the system performance, and the optimization of the antenna design using a genetic algorithm. |
