  Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest from the
academia and industry most recently. Motivated by the wide usage of UAVs, this
paper considers UAV communication with reconfigurable antenna (RA) in the
presence of fading and shadowing effects which occur due to tall buildings and
skyscrapers in urban areas. More precisely, RA offers to receive information
through mirror activation patterns (MAPs) so that it can achieve a receive
diversity with decreased error probability by using only one radio frequency
(RF) chain. Also, media based modulation (MBM) technique for data transmission
with MAPs can be exploited by using RAs with reduced cost. To quantify the
performance of the proposed UAV system, we derive a tight upper bound for the
overall error probability by considering approximated channel model to the
standardization studies for UAVs. The results have shown that RAs can make the
overall system more resilient to shadowing and fading effects in terms of error
performance, and they are energy efficient.
