High Frequency Digital Beamforming Phased Array Antenna Systems for Increased Satellite Communication Ground System Capacity and Resiliency

Proliferated satellite architectures hold promise to expand mission capability but challenge existing ground system capacity because the majority of today’s ground parabolic antenna systems are limited to a single satellite contact a time. Phased array ground antenna systems have shown promise to provide multiple simultaneous satellite contacts from a single antenna system at low frequencies (i.e. L/S-band) but high-frequency (i.e. X/Ka-band) phased arrays supporting wide bandwidth mission data downlinks have thus far been prohibitively expensive and too power hungry to be feasible for operational use. To address this mission need, L3Harris has developed hybrid array architecture comprised of high-frequency, high-gain, antenna elements with a digital combining backend architecture. This enterprise antenna solution is relatively low-power and is highly scalable in number of simultaneous beams, RF performance (i.e. G/T / link margin) and operational downlink frequency. The architecture also improves mission resiliency by providing variable link margin and graceful degradation. This presentation will summarize L3Harris’ progress developing and demonstrating a prototype Ka-band phased array with live satellite downlinks.