Wirelessly Controllable Reflectarray Antenna

The demand for high gain and high aperture satellite antennas has been evolving tremendously recently and will carry on during the next years. They may be required to not only provide a good RF performance yet versatile operation but also to keep an easy integration mechanism with the platform for applications that require beam steering. One such application for large aperture antennas is Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). This paper presents a novel concept of a wirelessly controllable electronic modular beam steerable and beam shaping X-Band reflectarray concept. The reflectarray is composed of a two-dimensional array of identical tiles, where each one is composed of several similar unit cells. Each unit cell has an active low-power device to control its reflection phase, allowing beam manipulation. Simple radio control signals, based on amplitude modulation, are sent by a separated feed providing the command for specific antenna pattern configurations. This command is interpreted and decoded by a specific low-footprint circuit embedded in the back of each tile that actuates on the phase control elements of each unit phase cell. The only external connection required for such reflectarray is a DC low-power bus, thus reducing the complexity of integration into a satellite.