C/X/K/Ka Multibeam Phased-Array Receiver Terminals for Maritime LEO SATCOM

The maritime satellite communications (SATCOM) plays an important role in the space-air-ground-sea communications. This paper presents $\mathbf{C} / \mathrm{X} / \mathrm{K} / \mathrm{Ka}$ phased array receiver terminals for maritime SATCOM, which are characterized by the reconfigurable multibeam that supports flexibly simultaneous multi-user data transmission. The development of the terminals has overcome significant challenges spanning from chip design and array assembly to beam alignment algorithms. The low-profile integrated multibeam phased array receiver terminals are developed based on the self-produced multibeam integrated circuits (ICs), which boast state-of-the-art phase and gain control performance. To calibrate amplitude-phase error, a calibration algorithm utilizing deep residual neural networks is proposed and implemented. To overcome the challenge arising from the coupled motion between the phased-array terminals and satellites under the maritime LEO SATCOM scenario, a beam alignment algorithm based on multi-channel phase weighting (MCPW) is proposed for the unique structure of multi-beam analog phased arrays. Both simulation and measurement results validate the performance of the multibeam phased array terminals.