Design of a Ku Band Planner Receive Array for DBS Reception Systems

The main objective of this chapter is to present to the readers a step-by-step design approach when designing antenna array. Subsequently, the chapter will proceed following an example design of a passive Ku band planner receive array antenna for direct broadcast from satellite (DBS) reception for mobile systems. First, an appropriate antenna topology capable of reaching our target goals will be selected and optimized to be the base array element. During the design process of the base element, some figures-of-merit will be proposed in order to make a comparative study with the designed antenna and previously published antenna structures. Subarrays of microstrip line feed antennas will be combined by waveguides in order to build a low-loss feed network for the array antenna. The main question during the design of the feed network is: “How should one form the subarrays and their accompanying waveguide feed networks?” These sections will answer this question by formulating the subarray and array feed network loss as an optimization problem with constraints on the size and the weight of the array. In the concluding sections, measurements on realized antennas will show that the design exhibits a 16.5% relative bandwidth, covering the complete downlink band, and the designed antennas have a 28.4–31.3 dBi gain for both vertical and horizontal polarizations. Results of some field tests will be given and conclusions will be made in the final section.