Ultra-Light Interlaced Active Electronically Steerable Antennas (ULI-AESA)

Goleta Star LLC with support from academia, Quinstar and other supporting businesses proposes to develop an Ultra-Light Interlaced Active Electronically Steerable Antennas (ULI-AESA) at two frequencies to support dual shared aperture usage. There are a number of alternative solutions that will be traded off in Phase I. The baseline proposed approach balances front-end innovation and advanced back-end processing techniques to evolve a cost-effective product for relatively small size UAV applications, with weight and power goals of < 10-lbs and < 100-watts respectively. The target system provides wide FOV coverage, with wide bandwidth for high resolution SAR and potentially wideband directive communications. The Phase I tradeoff effort will enable DARPA to select a preferred approach, from among the candidate options presented, for detailed design, development and evaluation in a Phase II. Limited lab testing and demonstration will be performed during the basic Phase I effort to assist in the tradeoff analysis and option formulation.