Design of Rim-Located Reconfigurable Reflectarrays for Interference Mitigation in Reflector Antennas

Radio telescopes are susceptible to interference arriving through its sidelobes. If a reflector antenna could be retrofitted with an adaptive null steering system, it could potentially mitigate this interference. The design of a reflectarray which can be used to reconfigure a radio telescope’s radiation pattern by driving a null to the angle of incoming interference is presented. The reflectarray occupies only a portion of the rim of the original reflector and lays conformal to the paraboloid within this region. The conformal reflectarray contains unit cells with 1-bit reconfigurability stemming from two symmetrically placed PIN diodes. It is found that the dielectric and switch losses introduced by the reflectarray do not significantly affect the radio telescopes efficiency since the reflectarray is placed only along the outer rim of the reflector which is weakly illuminated. Simulation results of an L-band reconfigurable reflectarray for an 18 m prime focus fed parabola are presented.