Wide-Angle Beam Steering AESA with Three-Dimensional Stacked PCB for Ka-Band In-Flight Connectivity

We developed wide-angle beam steering AESA for Ka-band in-flight connectivity. In order to obtain wide-angle beam steering characteristics at a low cost, we adopted the three-dimensional stacked PCB structure. This structure can realize high RF performances and scalability of aperture size. Based on this concept, we made two prototypes of 16 antenna elements TX-AESA and 256 antenna elements RX-AESA and evaluated RF performances. In each of AESA prototype, we achieved the beam steering of over 70 degrees and XPD of over 20dB in 2.5GHz bandwidth.