Design of an Efficient Antenna for Asian Hornet (Vespa Velutina) Tracking Using Insect Telemetry

Abstract

The Asian hornet (Vespa Velutina) is an invasive predator of wild pollinators in Europe. The only means of containing their fast spread is to destroy their nests, at the invasion front. Radio-telemetry tags have been tested successfully for Asian hornet tracking. However, there are inefficiencies in these tags due to near-field interactions between the hornets and the tags' antennas. Additionally, there is a need for lighter tags with smaller antennas. Therefore, this work presents a hornet-specific monopole antenna design, operating at 866 MHz. To this aim, the influence of the hornet on the monopole's radiation performance is characterized, using numerical simulations in which a hornet model, obtained by micro-CT scanning was used. These showed that, when the monopole is in proximity to the hornet and connected to a 50 Omega source, reducing the wire's length to 98 mm would optimize impedance matching, leading to 0.0004% of the input power to reflect. Moreover, results showed that the near-field interactions between the hornet and the monopole can lower its radiation efficiency by 20%, and its maximum gain by 1.14 dBi.