Beam-Forming Feeds

When phased arrays were relatively simple, antenna subassemblies were easy to identify as feed networks, phasors, and radiating aperture. Modern phased arrays, however, have become quite complex, with a wide variety of designs and physical implementations depending on the particular application. With simple phased arrays the feed network was a passive network of branching transmission lines to distribute the power from a single transmitter to each of the radiating elements in the array via the phasors, and, conversely on receive, it combined the power received by each of the radiating elements to the input to a single receiver. Modern phased arrays may have multiple distributed transmitters, multiple distributed preamplifiers, multiple duplexing switches, and multiple simultaneous beam ports, each with its own final receiver. In addition, adaptive arrays may have adaptive control loops distributed throughout the feeding network with a significant amount of signal processing done within the antenna. For these reasons, general categories and general definitions become somewhat ambiguous. However, since generality is necessary to discuss phased arrays in general, an attempt is made to organize feed systems into general categories, and the reader should be aware of the shortcomings.

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