Feed horn antennas for data downlink and uplink spaceborne communications

New developments in feed horn technology are becoming very important for data downlink and uplink feed horn antennas employed in spaceborne communications. Applications requiring higher data rates, such as high-speed Internet services, call for much higher antenna gains and wider frequency bandwidths. For these reasons, this type of service has been typically provided using multiple spot beam antennas operating at the K/Ka-band. In this type of configuration, a lot of horns must be arranged together, and because of this a common Tx/Rx antenna solution is usually the preferred option to drastically reduce the weight of the feed array. The presently preferred solution is to use smooth walled spline profile feed horns because high aperture efficiencies can be obtained with them, which leads to a much higher degree of size reduction in the feed horn array. Corrugated feed horns, which present better radiation properties, suffer from lower aperture efficiencies in comparison.