Shaped single-feed-per-beam multibeam reflector antenna

Current Ka-band multibeam satellite antenna systems often use one feed per beam, but involve a high number of reflector antennas (four for transmit and four for receive) to realise both acceptable crossover levels and spillover losses (Rao, 1999). Several developments go on to reduce the number of reflectors to one for transmit and one for receive at the cost of much complexity in the feed array and beamforming. Orthogonal efforts aim at developing antennas that both receive and transmit. Here we present a new concept (patent pending) where a shaped reflector reduces both the number of feeds per beam and the number of reflectors to one (with separate receive and transmit antennas). The price paid is an oversizing of the reflector making the reflector area comparable to the total area of the conventional four-reflector solution.