DUAL-BEAM KA-BAND-BASED MULTI-ORBIT AERONAUTICAL FLAT PANEL ANTENNA (ARTES AT 7C.106) - EXPRO+ (ON DELEGATION REQUEST)

Objective: The objective of this activity is to design, manufacture and test a Ka-band based (Ka-only or Ka and Ku) dual-beam electronically scanning flat panel antenna able to simultaneously connect to two satellites located at two different orbits. Four beams, two for transmit and two for receive path , will be implemented with two apertures.Targeted Improvements: - 50% antenna surface reduction required for the generation of 2 simultaneously active antenna beams compared to conventional phased array implementation.- Complexity reduction of the associated beamforming networks compared to phased arrays based on digital beamformers or multi-band beamformers.Description: The growing trend of combining the use of GEO and NGSO satellite systems for the provision of in-flight connectivity to airplanes suggests the use of antenna terminals able to connect simultaneously to two satellites located on different orbits. A possible operational scenario could envisage the use of LEO satellites for latency-sensitive content to be supplemented by GEO satellites connectivity, possibly over congested areas that are commonly found in lower latitudes that do not require extreme antenna scanning angles to connect to equatorial orbits. At higher latitudes, two concurrently operated antenna beams could simultaneously connect to two LEO satellites to provide aggregate data traffic. The approach of deploying a single antenna aperture per antenna beam leads to doubling the overall terminal surface occupation. Alternatively, producing more than one beam from a single array of radiating elements would require complex design for the radiating elements themselves as well as for the associated beam-forming network. The observation that connecting to NGSO systems does not require scanning the antenna beams to very wide angles suggests that the inter-element spacing can be relaxed, allowing for interleavingtwo simple arrays sharing a common antenna surface, each array could then be fed by a simple single-beam beam-forming network, resulting in a practical implementation.This activity will design a dual-beam electronically scanning flat panel antenna to exploit a common surface to implement two simultaneously operating antenna beams connecting to two satellite operating from different orbits and possibly at different frequencies (Ku- or Ka-band), this for the transmitting as well as for the receiving antenna functions. This will result in an antenna aperture generating two independent receiving beams and a second one generating two independent transmitting beams. A reduced scale prototype of a dualbeam flat panel antenna, either operating in transmit or in receive mode, will be developed and tested.