A synthetic aperture antenna for femto-satellites based on commercial-of-the-shelf

Femto-satellites are very small satellites weighing less than 100 grams and by concept they are low cost. These kinds of satellites are very often based on the so called Commercial-Of-The-Shelf components. They are suitable for applications with low budget and with short time of development. The satellite remains in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) of 250 kilometers for few weeks, and afterwards the orbit can be reused. A new strategy is considered that consists in dedicating the whole satellite to a particular mission, the satellite can be reprogrammed in orbit to provide dynamic support for Disaster Management in natural disasters such as earthquakes. A big issue for such tiny satellites is the communications. They should achieve a link budget of hundreds of kilometers with hundreds of thousands bits per second with a power budget of few watts. The directivity of the antenna and the accuracy to point ground stations should be increased. Also the antenna works as the satellite structure. In this paper a synthetic aperture antenna for femto-satellites based on Commercial-Of-The-Shelf is presented. This implementation meets all the previous requirements as a proof of concept. Different configurations of ceramic antennas array were used. Some transceivers and High Gain Amplifiers were tested. A semi-anechoic chamber results are also presented describing the antenna radiation pattern. In order to change the phase of each ceramic antenna, passive components were used like micro- strips.