This extremely compact beam forming community has been designed for multi-beam satellite tv for pc payload antennas. Generating a complete of 64 sign beams outputted from a single antenna, this novel design might cowl all the Earth with a number of spot beams from geostationary orbit.“The traditional solution for a multibeam telecommunications satellite payload would be a single feed per signal beam, but only a limited number of feeds are able to be accommodated in front of the satellite antenna, with each feed requiring a dedicated amplifier,” explains Petar Jankovic of ESA’s Radio Frequency Equipment and Technology part.“This is a highly integrated, lower mass alternative, developed with Airbus in Italy.”What appears to be like like a sunburst design is definitely a ‘Rotman’ lens, laid down on a printed circuit board, used to direct and focus microwaves. These are generally employed in terrestrial radar methods, for occasion aboard high-end drones or in-car radar, and are additionally being checked out for future 5G base stations.A single flat Rotman lens permits beam scanning alongside a single axis. For this design, eight of those Rotman lenses are stacked horizontally, and eight extra are organized vertically. The result’s a two-dimensional array of 64 pencil-shaped sign beams – and this structure may be leveraged up as desired. “Testing of our prototype demonstrator shows high performance, demonstrating low insertion loss and with the measured worst-case return loss for the beam ports and array ports always better than 15 decibels throughout the full Ka- operative band,” provides Petar. “For all our measured beams very regular pointing has been achieved.”Almost good alignment between simulation and measurement outcomes have been achieved, guided by ESA in-house software program that converts mathematical fashions of the lenses into geometric buildings, mixed with business software program used to simulate the prototype upfront of its manufacture and testing.Developed by ESA’s long-running Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme, this beam forming community demonstrator was designed and constructed utilizing space-qualified options, supplies and processes. The subsequent step could be to fabricate a qualification mannequin to qualify the design at tools stage for flight.
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