Circularly and linearly polarized planar reconfigurable active array antennas in Ka Band

Resumen

This paper presents an evaluation procedure of a commercial integrated circuit (IC) for phased array antenna beam steering purposes within mobile satellite communication applications at Ka Band (28-30 GHz). It allows to control amplitude and phase delivery from one common port to 8 independent channels. Therefore, only the transmission system is evaluated. Two different passive arrays are proposed to evaluate IC performance: a 2x2 planar array with switchable circular polarization (SCP) capabilities and an 8x8 planar array fed by columns for azimuth beam steering with linear polarization (LP). Thus, since the first array is not as big enough for evaluating beam steering performance, it is only used for SCP performance evaluation. A second array, which is bigger but not circularly polarized, allow beam steering evaluation. Measurements of the proposed full integrated systems will be presented at the conference.