A dual polarised feeder link antenna design for the European DRS satellite

The design concept, initial tradeoffs, and final design for the dual-polarized feeder link antenna for the ESA Data Relay System (DRS) satellite are considered. With reference to the fairly complex DRS feeder link antenna requirement, it has been established that a shaped single offset reflector antenna with two feeds (one per beam) can be used to achieve a reasonable coverage flux performance. It is shown that a worthwhile improvement in overall link performance can be achieved if the antenna coverage is optimized to take into account not only variations in path loss but also variations in atmospheric attenuation. Mid band contour plots of computed radiation patterns are shown for copolar transmit and transmit XPD (cross-polar discrimination). Despite the significant difference in frequencies, the copolar receive pattern provided comparable coverage gain.<<ETX>>