Design Consideration of High Gain Microstrip Antenna Arrays for Telemetry Tracking and Command System of Geostationary Satellites

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a microstrip patch array at 10.7 GHz for downloading the telemetry data of the telemetry tracking and command (TT&C) system of a satellite. The array consists of microstrip fed $32\times 32$ elements with more than 31 dBi gain. Systematic observations from the individual element and the intermediate arrays present some specific and useful observations on gradual increase in array bandwidth and reduction in gain/efficiency. Different aspects of using a high gain antenna for TT&C application are also discussed. The results presented here, will serve as a reference for future studies as not many reports on microstrip-fed large arrays at X/Ku-band are available in open domain.