Spherical Harmonic Theory Investigations for Spherical Antenna Arrays

Low Earth Orbit satellite communications can be significantly improved by the omni-directional beamscanning ability of the spherical antenna arrays. The signal processing of spherical antenna arrays is essentially enhanced by employing spherical harmonic theory. Spherical harmonics (or spherical modes) exploit sphere’s perfect symmetry and demonstrate the feature to “reproduce” themselves in the farfield. First, this paper justifies the cost and performance superiority of the spherical arrays compared to the planar case. In addition, it presents several spherical array investigations that utilize spherical harmonic theory, offering substantial enhancement and simplifying the computational level of the array processing.