Design of a 64-Element Dual-Polarized Planar Receive Phased Array with Four Concurrent Reconfigurable Beams for Ka-Band SATCOM

This paper presents the design and simulation of a 64-element low-profile dual-polarized receive phased array antenna system with four independent reconfigurable beams for Ka-band low-earth-orbit satellite communication (SATCOM). Single-aperture-integrated multi-beam array systems induce great electrical, thermal, physical, and process challenges due to the extremely limited layout space requirements. To tackle the above problems, an 18-layer high-density hybrid laminated printed circuit board stack-up is utilized. A slot-fed dual-polarized patch antenna array with feed rotation is designed and simulated to guarantee polarization diversity within a simple geometry. Dedicated onboard multi-layer-embedded 4 × 16:1 Wilkinson combining networks are proposed and optimized to facilitate compact multi-beam forming. Simulated results show that the proposed array can synthesize four separate beams scanning up to ±50° in the azimuth plane with low loss and high isolation across 27.5−32 GHz. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a planar phased array supporting four simultaneously reconfigurable beams for Ka-band SATCOM.