An on-board integrated beam conditioning system for active phased array satellite antennas

This paper discusses an integrated on-board beam conditioning (Lier et al.) or control system for a satellite-based phased array antenna. The system presented takes advantage of synergy and commonality of the calibration and attitude determination subsystems. The integrated system assumes a near field calibration approach based on the control circuit encoding (CCE) technique (Silverstein et al., 1996), conventional monopulse for receive array pointing, and an orthogonally encoded monopulse technique (Purdy et al.) for transmit antenna pointing (attitude determination)