Programme Element: ARTES 5.1
Tender nr.: AO 1-7474
Open from: 16 May 2013
Closes on: 11 Jul 2013
Objective: to develop a retro-directive Ka-band terminal antenna using a hybrid low power analogue/digital approach.
Targeted Improvements: by designing an electronic self tracking antenna with simple and low powered hybrid analogue/digital architecture, additional sensors needed for satellite tracking can be eliminated. Power consumption of this hybrid solution can be reduced by as much as a factor of eight as compared to a full digital solution. These improvements will reduce complexity and improve tracking performance.
Description:
Current self steering antennas for satellite ground terminals require complex mechanical or electronic steering arrangements. The retrodirective array offers a refreshingly new and simple approach to this problem. It can swiftly point and track to a remote signal and retransmit back in the same direction, using simple circuits. These antennas have been known from about the 1960?s, although nothing to date has made it to a real world application, due to the many drawbacks that have recently been successfully addressed and are mentioned here below.
This activity is a further development of the ESA TRP project ?Self Focusing Retro-Reflective Antennas for Mobile Terminal Applications, AO/1-6168/09/NL/JD? which has resulted in a practical 2.4 GHz 1x5 array with the following advantages: (1) Operates at RX signals of -120dBm, (2) Constructive combination of signals on RX and TX, (3) Compensates for beam pointing error due to TX/RX frequency offset, (4) Operates with QPSK/16QAM modulation via a pilot tone (5) CP array has 8.5% bandwidth and beam steering of +/- 40 degrees, (6) Power consumption < 500mW (1x5 array), (7) Simple enough to fit on a single planar structure.
There are two main tasks within this activity: (1) Modification of the existing analogue architecture to provide enhanced operation with phase modulated signals (e.g. QPSK and 16-QAM) and hence eliminating the need of a pilot tone . This is likely to include a hybrid low power analogue/digital approach. (2) Scaling in frequency of the existing 2.4 GHz antenna and circuits to frequencies as high as Ka band with MMIC technology.
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