Study of deployed and modular active phased-array multibeam satellite antenna

A deployed, self-cooled and modular (tile-based) active phased array for multibeam applications has recently been proposed in the literature. This novel antenna facilitates the implementation of large array antennas in space with many beams from the same aperture, offering a flexible payload with the potential for high traffic capacity. However, the configuration also raises some questions about degradation in antenna performance, due to constraints such as non-circular aperture, frame gap, uniform amplitude excitation, and a calibration boom deployed in front of the array. Methods dealing with these issues are discussed in this paper. It is shown that a phase-only optimization technique can effectively reduce interference between same-frequency spatially reused beams, and can compensate for EIRP and C/I degradation for tile-correlated errors and failures.