Potentialities of reflector antennas with reflectarray feeds for reconfigurable coverage

Conclusion The different results obtained with this antenna concept show some interesting potentialities. Indeed, directivities above 34 dB can be obtained on different shaped coverages without too much complexity for the reflectarray design and with an interesting compactness gain compared to classical dual reflector antennas. Moreover, the number of cells can be limited to a value below 2000 thanks to the reflector whereas more elements would have been necessary with a single reflectarray. This reduction is an important fact for the active cells consumption and manufacture. Another interest of this solution is the versatility of the active reflectarray panel. Once the optimized phase shifts have been synthesized, the panel has just to be electronically driven. A combination of several elementary panels can also be foreseen for versatility and manufacture easiness, which is contributing to a cost reduction. Other works on this concept are currently led to improve the performances and to afford flexibility on more than two coverages with a reduced cell numbers.