Programme Element: ARTES 5.1
Reference nr.: 12.1TT.12
Planned Tender Issue: quarter 2, 2013
The objective of the activity is to design, manufacture and test a breadboard of a user and gateway feed chain at Ka-, Q/V-band.
Targeted Improvements: new product removing one antenna from the antenna farm with major impact on cost, mass and satellite accommodation.
Description:
Next generation broadband telecommunication satellites are considering the Ka-band for the user link and the available Q/V-band for the feeder link. The available Ka bandwidth will be completely dedicated to users, increasing the system capacity. The current antenna farm for such missions is based on two separate antennas for Ka and Q-V-band, leading to very complex accommodation on the spacecraft. A solution to overcome this problem is to use multi-frequency feeds that allow the reflector aperture to be shared and generate both user and gateway beams with the same reflector antenna. The pointing accuracy achievable with existing Ka-band RF sensing will be investigated to assess the performance achievable at Q/V-band. The use of the same large reflector for Ka and Q/V-band will enhance antenna performance at Q/V band.
This activity will focus on the development and testing of a breadboard of a multi-frequency dual polarised feed chain covering conventional Ka-band user link frequencies and Q/V-band feeder link frequencies. The activity shall investigate different feed architectures in order to cover all the challenging requirements needed to fulfil next generation broadband missions. Feed chain requirements will be derived by an antenna system analysis considering a typical single feed per beam configuration.
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