Deterministic Design Procedures on Limited Field-of-View Planar Arrays for Satellite Communications Employing Aperture Scaling

The antenna field of view, the angle range that can be accessed by scanning the main beam of a phased array, is one of the key performance prescriptions especially for space-borne aerials. The classical example of the full Earth, continental and subcontinental field of view of the geosynchronous satellite is indicative, and it extends to the medium and lower orbit multibeam telecommunication systems. There, a high-gain, very small beamwidth pencil beam should scan a given service area. At the same time, it should exhibit extremely low sidelobes in order not to present interference to adjacent geographical areas, served by neighboring beams, and keep its grating lobes out of the Earth's surface. High-throughput telecommunication satellites should comply with those prescriptions to be given permission for placement in orbit. Thus, the motivation for delivering solid methods for the design of limited-field-of-view array antennas is high. A proposal in this direction is presented in the work at hand. Indeed, in the present study a scaling transformation is used to map a wide-angle scanning array to a limited-field-of-view one. We start the design from a Full-Field-of-View array with the appropriate half-power beamwidth, sidelobe level, and directivity index, and then we enlarge it to attain the desired one with the limited-field-of-view pattern characteristics. The potential of the method is solid since it augments the limited-field-of-view design methods using the excellent performance of the respective full-field-of-view ones. As a result, the synthesis of a limited-field-of-view array can use any of the well-known array synthesis methods in conjunction with the right scaling. Additionally, one can employ design methods that rely on sampling of planar aperture distributions. Various design examples, employing both sampling of continuous apertures and utilizing classical full-field-of-view array synthesis methods, are included and presented in detail, verifying the merit of our approach.