A LOW LOSS AND STEERABLE REFLECTARRAY ANTENNA IN KA BAND
01 January 2004
A reflectarray antenna is an attractive solution for reconfigurable antennas, for it has both advantages of arrays - beam shaping with fixed antenna - and reflectors - high efficiency single feed. However, to be competitive, it has to present low losses, high reliability, and low cost. To reach these objectives, a Ka band steerable reflectarray was developed under the French Research project ARRESAT involving industrial partners, academic partners and SMEs. Innovating phase shift elements, providing phase control thanks to Micro Electro Mechanical Switches (MEMS) were designed and built. These phase shift elements operated in circular polarisation over a large band (17.8-19.3 GHz), with a 2.5 bits resolution. A reflectarray antenna was designed, fabricated, and measured and demonstrated excellent results over a wide band : Radiation efficiency > 60% over this band, and very low cross polarisation (