High capacity phased array antennas for theater recce/intel networks

Increasing demand for exchanging high-resolution video, infrared sensors, various types of radar data, and other high value information readily, among the users in a military theater has urgently created the need for sophisticated wide-band communication systems. The users of such communication systems can be based on the surface, in the air and can be expected to be not only mobile, but also highly mobile. A full capacity communication network will be required to accomplish an orderly, reliable, and timely exchange of such high volume data among the various users in the network. Directional antennas will be necessary where high-speed data transfer is required. Phased array antennas provide an excellent alternative to the conventional dish antennas on the airborne platforms to meet the rapid switching requirements from user to user. This paper describes a half-duplex phased array antenna design, which is capable of operating over a number of frequency bands in the 8-26 GHz frequency range. Such communication network will provide high data rate links. The new phased array antenna architecture incorporates a number of novel ideas that include a phase shifter design, which uses piezoelectric transducer (PET); diplexer and filter designs with low RF insertion loss and high attenuation at the out-of-band frequencies. In addition, the new antenna system incorporates an efficient transmitter and receiver design based on MMIC-chips and a radiating planar antenna element, which can be easily extended to the phased array antenna capable of operating over 8-40 GHz frequency range.