High Isolation Transmit/Receive Antennas for Advanced Electronic Warfare (EW) and Communications Applications

Recently, modern tactical warfare has relied more and more heavily on technologies requiring radio frequency (RF) capabilities. For applications ranging from networking functions (like peer-to-peer and satellite communications) to individual capabilities (like electronic warfare and signals intelligence), a common impetus is to extend broadband functionality to expand system performance. As the operational spectra of these functions have grown – often to overlapping bands, there has been a corresponding increase in the difficulty of using these functions simultaneously. However, because they function independently, there are usually no interoperability or compatibility considerations made for the various functions used aboard modern US military ground platforms. Furthermore, there is often no way to be sure of interoperability and compatibility on a particular platform configuration without extensive testing. Accordingly, this effort strives to generate isolation techniques that provide platform independence, require no calibration, provide efficient performance over the entire 20-8000 MHz spectrum, and do not rely on expensive, unreliable, or frequency-dependent components. During Phase I, FIRST RF demonstrated techniques that achieved 20 to 65dB of isolation improvement compared to legacy techniques. During Phase II, FIRST RF will leverage this work to provide improvements in bandwidth, isolation, and robustness.