Abstract
A new X-band retrodirective antenna based on superheterodyne mixer and phase conjugating technology is proposed for inter-satellite data transmission in this paper. The novel phase conjugating circuit, utilizing the reciprocity of the passive mixers, achieves high RF-IF and LO-IF isolations, high communication link gain, and a very compact low profile layout with all antenna elements and circuit components arranged at one common layer of a double-sided printed circuit board (PCB). Its mathematical principles of circuit design are derived, and the effect of up and down conversion loss deviation of mixers on the amplitude and phase error of the circuit, thus on the beam pointing error and the side-lobe of the antenna is discussed. A prototype of circularly polarized one dimension retrodirective antenna is fabricated, and its bistatic RCS measurement in an anechoic chamber is implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed antenna array. The results show that, within the scanning range from -30° to +30°, the array has good retrodirective performance. The proposed antenna would be a good choice for the inter-satellite data transmission inside a distributed satellite cluster.
Highlights
There has been considerable interest focused on satellite communication in recent years, due to its advantages of wide communication coverage and convenient implementation of multiple access communication
The results indicate that the antenna has relatively good beam pointing accuracy and side-lobe performance within the conversion loss deviation of 2dB, whereas radiation patterns have higher beam pointing error (BPE) and worse side-lobe performance when the conversion deviation is more than 10dB
In Table. 1, Vrf and Vout are the amplitude of the incident RF signal and retroreflected intermediate frequency (IF) signal, respectively. φrf and φout are the phase of the incident RF signal and retrodirective IF signal, respectively
Summary
There has been considerable interest focused on satellite communication in recent years, due to its advantages of wide communication coverage and convenient implementation of multiple access communication. Compared to the conventional large satellites, modern microsatellites (including nanosatellites (∼10kg) and picosatellites (∼1kg)) have the merits of small volumes, low mass, low power-consumption, short development cycle (from the proposal to final launch) and low cost. Designing an antenna adapted to the microsatellites application within limited weight and power consumption has become the primary consideration in its communication system. To improve the power efficiency and security, the conventional phased array antenna seems to be another candidate due to its convenient beamsteering capability. This kind of antenna normally has complicated phase shift, feed network, and a large number of transmitting and receiving modules which lead to large volume, weight, and power consumption, so it is not suitable for the above-mentioned microsatellite applications
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