Low cost flat antennas for commercial and military SATCOM terminals

A class of flat antenna arrays implemented with multilayer printed circuit technology offers several advantages that make them attractive for SATCOM terminals for both commercial and military applications. Lower profile and lighter weight are among the desirable features. Whether the system provides narrow band services, such as voice, fax and data, or broadband services, such as Internet and multimedia, the flat antenna can be an attractive alternative to other more volumetric reflector antennas. This paper surveys the applications that may use this type of antenna and reviews some of the developments for terminals in a number of military and commercial systems. A parametric sizing of the antenna is presented at different frequency bands. Four actual realizations are presented. The first is a realization at Ku-band for the global broadcast satellite (GBS) system. This realization uses four flat plate panels with a waveguide combiner to reduce the losses and increase the G/T of the antenna. This demonstrates the feasibility of using the flat plate antenna for medium data rate (MDR) SATCOM-on-the-move (SOTM) and SATCOM-on-the-pause (SOTP) terminals. The examples for commercial applications include a Ku-band briefcase mobile terminal in a code-division multiple access (CDMA) system, a briefcase mobile terminal at S-band for the INSAT satellite system and a Ka-band realization that can be applied to future SATCOM systems as well as local multimedia distribution systems (LMDS).