Ka Band Multi-Beam Phased Array Antenna for

Communication Satellite Application

Jingtao Li1,2, Zhicheng Zhou2, Xiaoqun Chen2, Jingrui Zhang , Shuo Wang3, Ruirong Wu3
1

1 .School of Aerospace Engineering, BIT, Beijing, China

2 .Institute of Telecommunication Satellite, CAST, Beijing, China
3 .China Electronics Technology Group Corporation No.38 Research Institute, Hefei, China
lijingtao216@sohu.com, zhouzhicheng@cast.cn, cxq_98@126.com, zhangjingrui@bit.edu.cn, 87280240@qq.com,
233000334@qq.com

Abstract— This paper presents a Ka band multi-beam phased constellations for the mobile satellite services. The interest in
array for communication satellite. Antenna element is carried out phased arrays for these systems is driven by their flexibility
as a double circular polarization horn. Phased array working at and ability to provide multiple simultaneous beams [7-9]. As
23 GHz of transmitting frequency and 26 GHz of receiving shown in Fig. 1, the wideband internetworking engineering
frequency is constructed with triangle grid arrangement. The test and demonstration satellite (WINDS) is equipped with a
transmitting part has 320 channels, while the receiving part Ka band Active Phased Array Antenna (APAA) among the
comprises 1280 channels. The phased array could provide 4 mission equipment. This APAA consists of a transmitting
transmitting beams and 8 receiving beams synchronously. antenna and a receiving antenna, each of which consists of
Scanning angle range is better than 13 degree of conical.
128 element antennas and high density RF modules attached
Equivalent isotropic radiated power(EIRP) achieves 56 dBW for
to the element antennas. With these components, the
each beam, and its G/T is better than 19 dB/K. Performances of
the element and array are simulated, which shows good transmitting and receiving antennas can each electronically
properties for the system design. scan two independent beams. Consequently, the WINDS
service area covers almost the entire visible region of earth
Keywords—multi-beam, phased array, triangle grid from the satellite. Antenna reception function for receiving
and amplifying is 28 GHz band to uplink signals and antenna
transmission function for amplifying and transmitting is 18
I. INTRODUCTION
GHz band to downlink signals. It has beam steering function
Phased array has high gain with low side lobes, which is with two independently steerable beams for each of the
able to permit the beam to jump from one target to the next in transmitting and receiving antennas.
a few microseconds[1]. And it could provide an agile beam
under computer control, which realizes arbitrarily modes of
surveillance and tracking without additional antenna servo
mechanism. It could work with multifunction operation by
emitting several beams simultaneously [2, 3]. And fault of a
few components reduce the capability and beam sharpness,
but the system remains operational. Due to these advantages,
phased arrays are widely used for mobile communication [4].
As the rapid development of space technology, all kinds of
communications, satellite telemetry data is increasing rapidly,
the satellite ground and inter satellite communication becomes
more and more quickly, the user terminal and the satellite
communication antenna requires higher performance. Both
multi-feed antenna and traditional reflector antenna, antenna
Fig. 1. Payload of Wideband InterNetworking engineering test and
for receiving and transmitting direction are the same, Demonstration Satellite (WINDS).
communication can only point to the same direction. When
there are multiple users access at the same time, In this paper, we mainly focus on a large scale phased
communication link could be established by using more array design for GEO satellite, which could be used for inter-
antennas. And it also require quickly and accurately change satellites link communication with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or
the antenna pointing to the target with servo control. This not Middle Earth Orbit (MEO) user terminal.
only increases the system complexity, weight and power
consumption, but also makes the satellite attitude affected by
the payload [5,6]. II. ANTENNA ELEMENT DESIGN
In this section, a antenna element for phased array is
Therefore, the application of phased array antennas in
presented. System require that phased array works on Ka band
space has developed very quickly. Phased array antenna is one
with left hand circular polarization as 23GHz of transmitting
of the choice for the geostationary earth orbit (GEO) or
frequency and right hand circular polarization as 26GHz of
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receiving frequency. which has the bandwidth of 1GHz and The simulation results of the antenna element are shown in
2.5GHz. And beam scanning range should be better than 13° Fig.5.
with 4 transmitting beams and 8 receiving beams. And the
EIRP should be 56dBW for each beam with G/T not less than
19dB/K.
According to the system arrangement which will cause the
problem of grating lobes in the space, the radiation element
should be designed with high gain to suppress grating lobes in
far zone [10]. One of the method after analysis is using a large
aperture double circular polarization horn as an element, not
only its performance can satisfy the requirements of
broadband, dual circular polarization, high gain, narrow lobes,
but also the project implementation is relatively simple which
has light weight and for application in space environment [11].
Antenna element is constructed as conical horn. The
antenna element is composed of three parts, which are a
conical horn, a double circular polarization device and a Fig. 4. Axial ratio of antenna for transimtting
receiving and transmitting isolation filter. Fig.2 shows the
configuration of the antenna element.

Fig. 2. The configuration of the antenna element

The gain of antenna element achieves13.05dB, when the
antenna deviates 13° from axial. And its axial gain could be
14.65dB, which is shown in Fig.3. The gain with beam width
is good of scanning range. The axial ratio of antenna for
transmitting is better than 1.1dB during the bandwidth of
1GHz in Fig.4.
Fig. 3. Gain of antenna element for transimtting
For receiving gain, it achieves 13.4dB, when the antenna
deviates 13° from axial. And its axial gain could be 15.52dB.
Fig. 5. Gain of antenna element for reveiving
III. KA BAND MULTI-BEAM PHASED ARRAY DESIGN
A. Phased Array Design
As the conventional planar phased array, antenna element
arrangement is used to form a regular grid, which has two
common types for engineering design. One is rectangular grid
with fixed element space as shown in Fig. 6(a), and the other
is triangle grid with relative sparse element compared
rectangle grid as shown in Fig. 6(b). Because rectangular grid
disposal method is simple, and the concentrated feed passive
array antenna can simplify the work in the design of feed
network, so it is more commonly used. For large two
dimensional active phased array, using the triangle grid can
effectively reduce the radiation elements and number of active
channels and cost, which makes it for more application.
When equilateral triangle grid arrangement is adopted,
13.4% of elements could be decreased compared with
rectangular grid arrangement. When the size of the phased
array is relatively large, which may achieve thousands,
reduction the number of antenna radiation elements has the
relative advantages in cutting down the cost of system design,
especially when the capacity of the communication satellite
platform is limited.

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 Due to the requirements for high frequency, high gain, low
side lobe，and multi beam scanning simultaneously, sparse
array is a reasonable scheme for system design. The number
of the antenna elements and its corresponding channels could
be reduced by appropriately increasing the distance among the
radiating elements.
(a) Rectangular grid arrangement (b) Triangle grid arrangement
Fig. 6. Two types of arrangement for array
Taking the requirements of scanning range, and no grating
lobes appear in the scanning range during the receiving and
transmitting band into consideration, the radiating element
spacing l is 2.27 times of the maximum frequency wavelength,
and d is 0.866 time of l, which is demonstrated in Fig.7.
d=0.866l
l=2.27λH
Fig. 7. Distance between phased array elements
B. Array and Beam Forming Network
When the antenna element distance is determined
according to the requirement of the scanning range, the factors
that determine the capability of the transmitting antenna are
only EIRP. As each beam 56dBW for system requirement, the
total system EIRP could be 62dBW for four beams. EIRP is
decided by two factors, that is, the radiating gain and the
output power of the system. Assuming that the output power
of each channel is 0.5W, the forward beam needs 320
channels. At this time, the gain of the antenna array is 37dB
(including filter and connection loss), which can satisfy the
EIRP value of each beam 56dBW.
Similarly, when the antenna element distance depends on
the scanning range, the factors that decide the capacity of the
receiving antenna are only G/T. The factors affect G/T include
two aspects: equivalent noise temperature of the system and
antenna gain. The system equivalent noise temperature is
determined by the antenna equivalent noise temperature Ta,
the filter loss and low noise figure three aspects. When the
beam pointing toward the earth, antenna equivalent noise
temperature could be 290k. In the system design, the antenna
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element is integrated with filter, which is in the form of a
waveguide, that filter loss Ls could be reduced to less than 0.5
dB. And the noise figure of low noise amplifier NF is 1.8dB.
Device temperature could be up to 50 ℃ on orbit, according to
the formula:
=T 10 log(290 + (10( Ls + NF )/10 − 1) × 323) (1)
System equivalent noise temperature is 27.9 dB. As 19
dB/K of system requirement, the antenna gain should be
higher than 46.9dB. According to simulation results, the
number of antenna elements should be reached 1280 to satisfy
the requirements of 46.9dB gain.
According to the analysis above, The transmitting link has
320 channels, while the receiving link comprises 1280
channels. 320 antenna elements of the antenna array are used
for receiving and transmitting, and the other 960 elements are
only used for receiving. The array aperture is 100 cm after
simulation and optimization.
For the consistency of beam direction of, the antenna using
approximate circular aperture array, the transmitting part
located in the center of array in red, while the receiving part is
blue as shown in Fig.8.
500
400
300
200
100
-100
-200
-300
-400
-500
-500 -400 -300 -200 -100 0 100 200 300 400 500
Fig. 8. Aperture of the phased array
In order to get the transmitting and receiving beams, beam
forming network should be designed to match the number of
receiving and transmitting beams. As shown in Fig.9,
transmitting network is composed of four parts, including
power dividers, attenuators, phase shifters and power
amplifiers. 8 antenna elements form a basic network unit, that
the transmitting array has 40 network units. As to the
receiving beam forming network, it consists of four parts,
including low noise amplifiers, power dividers, attenuators,
and phase shifters, which is presented in Fig. 10.
C. Simulated Results and Application
The beam of scanning performance is simulated according
to the final array optimization results. The results are shown
from Fig.11 to Fig.14.
 Fig. 12. Gain of transimtting beam at 13° of elevation
Fig. 9. Beam forming network for transimtting

Fig. 13. Gain of receiving beam at axial

Fig. 10. Beam forming network for receiving

According to the system design, simulation results show

that by using triangle grid arrangement, phased array could
satisfy the requirements of high gain and narrow beam. When
the beam is scanning in the range of 0° to 13°, the side lobe of
the transmitting beam is lower than 20dBc. Grating lobes for
13° conical scanning range in transmitting band in can
suppress at 17.5° outside. The main lobe of the receiving beam
is about 30° apart from the grating lobe, and it can suppress
the grating lobes in the receiving frequency band to 14.5°. All
the results demonstrates the good performance of phased array.

Fig. 14. Gain of receiving beam at 13° of azimuth

The Ka band phased array is designed for GEO

Fig. 11. Gain of transimtting beam at axial
communication satellite to provide capability to transfer large
volumes of data via a space-to-ground link. It could build inter
satellite links with low orbit spacecrafts to realize data
transmission by using program tracking.
The phased array antenna is placed on top of the satellite
with others payloads in order to keep a good axial field view,
as shown in Fig15. And the solar array will provides the
power for satellite operation.

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Phased Array
Spot Beam
Antenna
Solar Array
Fig. 15. Phased Array for communication satellite application
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a Ka band multi-beam phased array for
communication satellite is presented. Antenna element is
provided as large caliber double circular polarization horn.
The gain of antenna element achieves 13.05dB at scanning
angle of 13°. And its axial gain could be 14.65dB, for
transmitting. The axial ratio of antenna for transmitting is
better than 1.1dB during the bandwidth of 1GHz. For
receiving, its gain is 13.4dB at scanning angle of 13°. And its
axial gain could be 15.52dB. The planar array is constructed
with triangle grid arrangement which effectively reduces the
additional channels. According to the beam forming network,
phased array could provides 4 transmitting beams and 8
receiving beams synchronously. Scanning angle range is better
than 13°. EIRP achieves 56dBW for each beam, and its G/T is
19dB/K. Performances of the element and array is simulated,
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which shows good properties for the system design. And its
application for communication satellite is demonstrated.
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