High Efficiency V/W Band Airborne Antenna

ABSTRACT: ThinKom will complete the design of and fabricate two dual-band antenna subarrays that operate at V-band and W-band based on the preliminary design completed in Phase I. The proposed airborne antenna design employs flight-proven broadband MMW planar aperture, polarization, feed, and gimbal ready technologies, customized in an affordable, modular, scalable, low-profile high-efficiency antenna subsystem capable of near-term deployment for V-band (71-76 GHz) and W-band (81-86 GHz) high-data rate communication links on a variety of aeronautical platforms. The utilization of low-loss spatial combining (subarray-mounted transceiver electronics) together with proven polarizer, integrated diplexer, and tracking circuitry substantially reduces the losses (and costs) of traditional combining, dual-pol feed, diplexer, pointing, rotary joint, and waveguide losses, thereby enabling 50 dBi+ class equivalent gain performance in an extremely compact (size: 5 x 20 aperture) low-drag form-factor. In addition, the modular scalable nature of the proposed design extends its applicability to the broadest possible range of aeronautical platform sizes and gain requirements. BENEFIT: The proposed planar aperture and related technologies have already been successfully demonstrated at W-band (94 GHz), flight- and link-tested at Q-band (44 GHz), and has been successfully produced and deployed (40,000+ units) at Ka-band (23, 26, and 38 GHz) in Commercial Point-to-Point applications. ThinKom is actively developing new Commercial Terrestrial Point-to-Point (38 dBi and 43 dBi) planar antenna products for V-band (71-86 GHz) as well as (DO-160) Commercial Aeronautical antenna subsystems at Ku- and Ka-bands SATCOM applications. Direct commercial benefits from the proposed development are therefore anticipated to be direct and immediate.