Satcom System Design Boot Camp – Antenna Arrays
Lessons
Phased array is a set of individual antenna elements arranged in a particular geometry. When properly excited the array can focus the energy on a specific direction. Designing a phased array involves modeling the array antenna accurately and integrate with the RF chains. A challenging area to model and simulate is the interaction between the antenna array and the electronics. Mutula coupling in the array poses a problem for impedance matching of electronics. In this video we discuss the modeling of the antenna array with elements patterns and S-parameters coming either from simulation or measurement. We also discuss the modeling of the beamforming electronics. A 3D array structure is proposed for the antenna array on the satellite and an hexagonal antenna for the ground station. Various measurements like the spectrum, directivity, EIRP, G/T etc. of phased array plus the cascaded measurements of the electronics, will be discussed.