Scalar feeds for 8 wavelength diameter homogeneous lenses

Improving the connectedness of airliners in flight to allow the realisation of passengers' expectations for uninterrupted cell phone usage and internet access requires overcoming the bottleneck between the airliners' internal networks and the wider world in a cost effective manner while still providing sufficient bandwidth. The 43.5 - 47 GHz band is attractive for airliner to ground links due to lack of utilisation and the small physical size of high gain antennas.Prior work on this lens reflector topology produced two satisfactory designs; a epsiv
_r
=2.5 lens fed by a conventional choked feed and a epsiv
_r
=1.7 lens fed by a conical horn with dielectric insert. The latter gave superior cross-track plane scan performance with more stable 3dB beamwidth, but the dielectric insert would be prohibitively small and expensive to construct for the 43.5 to 47GHz band. An alternative higher gain scalar feed is thus required for the epsiv
_r
=l .7 lens.