An Active Pointing Compensator for Large Beam Waveguide Antenna Under Wind Disturbance

With increasing interest in the application of large beam waveguide antenna operated at high frequencies, the requirement for pointing accuracy becomes more demanding. Owing to wind disturbance inevitably causing certain reflector surface distortions which lead to a pointing error, the overall antenna performance decreases. To decrease the pointing deviation, this study analyzes the pointing error caused by the structural deformation under wind disturbance and proposes a novel real-time pointing error correction system (RPECS) by designing the configuration of an active control beam waveguide with a real-time position adjustable plate mirror (APM). Through inverse displacement analysis, the pointing errors resulting from reflector surface distortions are compensated through properly adjusting the position of the APM. A displacement amplification factor is designed to ensure that the displacement of the APM should fall within the driving stroke range. Using a 65-m S/X band antenna, the simulation results show that the root-mean-square pointing error with RPECS is reduced by 92.6% compared with the traditional control method, the gain loss is only about 0.04 dB after compensation.