Ku-Band SATCOM User Terminal With Complete Beam Steering Using a Shared Aperture Metasurface for Full-Duplex Operation

An electronic beam steering SATCOM user terminal with full-duplex capability in shared aperture and high efficiency is presented in this work. The antenna is designed using a metasurface aperture operated through holographic beam forming. Three sub-arrays are integrated into the metasurface resulting in a Tripleband Metasurface Aperture (TMA) that covers the entire receive and transmit bands with high efficiency. The TMA is manufactured using traditional flat panel display technology. An RF liquid crystal is used as the tunable dielectric to provide the reconfigurability needed for beam steering, polarization, and frequency switching. This user terminal has a built-in LTE & multi-WAN 3G and can seamlessly switch between satellite and terrestrial networks.