A Flexible Element Antenna for Ka-Band Active Phased Array SATCOM Transceiver

An element antenna for a Ka-band flexible active phased array transceiver (TRX) on a liquid crystal polymer (LCP) board is designed to keep a smaller volume while it is being launched with a higher data rate and beam synthesis. An element antenna and microstrip line is also fabricated on the LCP board to verify the feasibility of the antenna on the LCP board operating with Ka-band and their basic characteristics on the LCP board. The 256-element active phased array TRX with the designed element antennas is also analyzed presenting a link budget. With the four-layer LCP board, the size of the antenna array could be implemented in a large size. The analyzed phased array TRX with the designed element antenna can communicate in 1.5 Gbps at 500 Km altitude and 30-degree elevation. Measured antenna gain and bandwidth together with microstrip lines are 3dBi and 1 GHz at the center frequency of 28GHz, respectively.