A Spaceborne Ka-Band Earth-Coverage Phased Array Antenna Based on DBF-Shared Subarray for LEO Communications

A spaceborne Earth-coverage phased array (ECPA) antenna at Ka-band is proposed for low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite applications, which is based on digital beamforming (DBF) partially shared subarray architecture to implement two stages of DBF. By taking into account the effects of mutual coupling in active element pattern optimization, a new method to obtain an Earth-matched beam of the equivalent element of the ECPA is presented, in which the DBF-shared subarray, segmental shaping technique, and differential evolution algorithm are utilized to achieve Earth-coverage characteristic for the ECPA. Both the design method and the principle of DBF partially shared subarray for grating lobe suppression are presented. Moreover, a 16-element DBF-shared subarray with a shared ratio of 4:1 obtaining an Earth-matched beam pattern is designed, optimized, and verified by full-wave simulation in Ansys Electronics Desktop. Taking the DBF-shared subarray as the equivalent element, an ECPA including 40 DBF-shared subarrays is also designed and simulated. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed ECPA has excellent performance of Earth-coverage scanning to compensate for the satellite communication link variation caused by path loss variation during beam scanning for LEO applications. In addition, the ECPA has the advantages of a low sidelobe level better than −20 dB as well as grating lobe suppression.