Design of Minituarized Ku-Band Front End for Satellite Command Receiver

This paper presents wideband miniaturized Ku-Band RF front end operating in the frequency band of 12.75 GHz to 13.25 GHz. The realized RF front end is highly compact as compared to the existing narrow band front end. The front end incorporates in house designed hermetically sealed MMIC LNA packaging using space qualified process, the packaged LNA is drop in type and provides ease of assembling. The complexity of local oscillator generation at Ku-Band was negated by designing a low conversion loss sub-harmonic filter. The miniaturized front-end distinctive features as compared to exiting front end is usage of fewer active devices, bandwidth improvement, fewer assembly elements, reduction in power consumption from 650mW to 200mW, improved gain from 10 dB to 15 dB, low LO drive, fewer spurious of below -50 dBc, all parameters are maintained over the operating temperature of -30 °C to +60°C. The miniaturized design has reduction in size and weight by 70% compared to existing design.