Advanced satcom antenna design tradeoffs

This paper describes parametric relationships that affect the design of high gain multibeam antennas, discusses tradeoffs, and presents optimized performance of two candidate antennas for wide-angle coverage Advanced Satcom: an aperiodic array with suppressed grating lobes and reduced number of elements, and a side-fed offset Cassegrain system with low scan loss. Given basic performance requirements such as the edge-of-coverage gain and the size of the coverage area, we shall determine parameters such as the antenna directivity and beamwidth, aperture diameter, radiating element diameter, number of elements, scan loss, number of beams, etc. Rather than performing a singe-point design which provides limited information, we shall obtain functional relationships spanning a range of vlaues.