An Effective Design Procedure of Multibeam Phased Array Antennas for the Applications of Multisatellite/Coverage Communications

This paper presents the design methodology of phased array antennas to radiate multiple beams, where each beam is equipped with an I/O port to allow independent uses. The potential applications include multicoverages in the mobile communications and multisatellite signal receptions using a single set of antennas. In particular, the beam-forming circuits employ Butler matrix (BM) as the core. Both the beam-forming mechanisms and the implementation of BM are presented. The uniqueness of this paper is that the coverage domain can be relatively arbitrarily defined, within which the beams will uniformly distributed. The beamwidth can be further flexibly controlled to provide an appropriate beam overlapping, which is important for the isolation of coverages. Numerical examples are presented to investigate the characteristics of this method and also demonstrate the feasibility.