Smart antennas for satellite communications on the move

Smart antennas are important for SATCOM on-the-move (SOTM) because they can increase the channel capacity and coverage range of the communication systems. Firstly, this paper briefly reviews the state-of-art on the smart antenna design for SOTM applications. Different types of antenna for SOTM are discussed. Then, two design examples from the recent collaborated research work from the University of Kent are presented. One is a Ka-band low-cost beam scanning folded reflectarray. This reflectarray uses the dual-polarized slot antenna with multi-layered PCB structure as the unit cell and scans its beam within large angle range. Another design example is a Ku-band low cost dual polarized reconfigurable reflectarray with single bit phase control by using PIN diodes. For both design examples, measurement results are given to show their good beam scanning performance.