Direct Radiating Arrays Assembled by Optimum Placement of Overlapped Radiators

Direct radiating arrays are undisputedly recognized as the final target step in the evolution of satellite telecommunication antennas. Their performance characteristics are unparalleled, but this comes with the cost of high number of controls needed for their implementation. Researchers have attacked this problem for more than a decade now achieving major reduction in the number of controls needed. For example, for 5 to 6 degrees field of view, the decrease was from roughly a thousand to 6 hundred controls - element radiators. Thus achieving 40% reduction and leading the state of the art. After this first stage, a second one is ongoing where designs with arrays of overlapping elements are pursued. In this case, while the initial anticipated number of controls reduction was an additional 20%, in the current work we contribute indicative high performance Direct Radiating Array designs that achieve an additional 35 to 50% reduction in the number of controls. Thus, the contributed results introduce the Direct Radiating Array implementation into the realm of feasibility since those extremely low number of controls needed are well into the reach of current technology.