Invited: The beauty of Multibeam Antennas

Giovanni Toso

European Space Agency, The Netherlands 

Abstract

Multibeam Antennas find application in several fields including communications, remote sensing (e.g. radars, radiometers, etc.), electronic surveillance and defense systems, science (e.g. multibeam radio telescopes), RF navigation systems, etc. Multibeam antennas constitute a key enabling element offering high gain and large field of view, and they are required to satisfy stringent performance in terms of sidelobe level, cross-polarization, number of beams and power and pattern reconfigurability. Even if used in several domains, the design of multibeam antennas is particularly critical and challenging when dealing with on board satellite applications. In this area, satellite manufacturers daily face an increase in demand of satellite handled bandwidth, offered power, frequency reuse, traffic reconfigurability, and embarked antenna sizes. Indeed some of the emerging applications are strictly power limited and the system trends consist in adopting large on-board antennas, advantages being the increase of the available gain. Depending mainly on the operational frequency, pattern requirements, transmitting and/or receiving functionality, different architectures may be selected: from antenna systems completely based on independent feeds illuminating a number of reflectors to hybrid systems based on both arrays and reflectors, from phased arrays to lens antennas. In the last ten years innovative configurations have been proposed exploiting new frequencies, materials, polarization properties and reconfiguration capabilities. The talk will provide an overview on recent developments in the field of Multibeam Antennas with special emphasis to satellite applications.

CV

Giovanni Toso  received the Laurea Degree (summa cum laude) and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florence, Florence, Italy, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. In 1996 he was visiting scientist at the Laboratoire d'Optique Electromagnétique, University of Aix-Marseille III, Marseille, France. From 1997 to 1999 he was a Post Doctoral student at the University of Florence. In 1999 he was a visiting scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In the same year he received a scholarship from Thales Alenia Space (Rome, Italy) and he has been appointed researcher in a Radioastronomy Observatory of the Italian National Council of Researches (CNR). Since 2000 he is with the Antenna and Submillimeter Section of the European Space and Technology Centre of the European Space Agency, ESA ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands. He has been initiating and contributing to several R&D activities on satellite antennas based on arrays, reflectarrays, constrained lenses and reflectors. In 2009 he has been coeditor of the Special Issue on Active Antennas for Satellite Applications in the International Journal of Antennas and Propagation. In April 2014 he has been co-guest editor, with Dr. R. Mailloux, of the Special Issue on Innovative Phased Array Antennas based on Non-Regular Lattices and Overlapped Subarrays published in the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. G. Toso is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.