Low-RCS Ka-band receiving and transmitting satellite communication antennas co-designed with high-performance absorbent frequency-selective radomes

Abstract

This paper investigates the low-RCS Ka-band receiving and transmitting satellite communication antennas co-designed with the high-performance absorbent frequency-selective radomes (AFSR). Consisting of the metamaterial absorber (MA) upper layer and bandpass FSS lower layer, two AFSRs operating at 19 and 29 GHz (receiving and transmitting central frequency) with low-frequency wideband absorbing and high-frequency low-insertion-loss transmission performances are proposed. To meet the needs of Ka-band satellite communication, two 4 × 4 microstrip array antennas working at the same central frequencies are co-designed with the AFSRs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AFSRs and co-designed antenna through simulations and measurements. The results show that the gain degradations are only 0.44 dB and 0.58 dB at two central frequencies after loading the AFSRs separately, and 10-dB RCS reduction bandwidths are ranging from 6.1–16.3 GHz (relative bandwidth 91.1%) and 10.2–24.8 GHz (relative bandwidth 83.4%) individually.