Synthesis technique for satellite antennas beam forming network

During the last years the use of shaped and reconfigurable beam antennas in communication satellites has required rather complex Beam Forming Networks (BFN's) to split and to phase the power among the feed array elements. A typical BFN is constituted by components such as couplers, phase shifters, variable power dividers (VPD's), switches and eventually active elements. The analysis and synthesis of such network is a high costing process that takes into account the analytical or electromagnetic models of components. Moreover, its sensitivity and global behavior prediction can be of great interest in the optimization of multifeed contoured beam antennas. As regards reducing computation time, this paper presents the use of the generalized transfer scattering matrix method applied to the analysis and synthesis of BFN's.