Low-RCS Ka-band receiving and transmitting satellite communication antennas co-designed with high-performance absorbent frequency-selective radomes

Abstract

This paper investigates the low-RCS Ka-band receiving and transmitting satellite communication antennas co-designed with the high-performance absorbent frequency-selective radomes (AFSR). Consisting of the metamaterial absorber (MA) upper layer and bandpass FSS lower layer, two AFSRs operating at 19 and 29 GHz (receiving and transmitting central frequency) with low-frequency wideband absorbing and high-frequency low-insertion-loss transmission performances are proposed. To meet the needs of Ka-band satellite communication, two 4 × 4 microstrip array antennas working at the same central frequencies are co-designed with the AFSRs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AFSRs and co-designed antenna through simulations and measurements. The results show that the gain degradations are only 0.44 dB and 0.58 dB at two central frequencies after loading the AFSRs separately, and 10-dB RCS reduction bandwidths are ranging from 6.1–16.3 GHz (relative bandwidth 91.1%) and 10.2–24.8 GHz (relative bandwidth 83.4%) individually.

KEYWORDS:

• RCS reduction
• radome
• frequency selective surface
• absorber

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Joint Fund of Equipment Pre-Research of Aerospace Science and Technology under Grant 6141B061008, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61871101, Grant 61721001, and Grant 61631006, and in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2016YFC0303501.

Notes on contributors

Zhiyu Xing

Zhiyu Xing was born in Shandong, China, in 1994. He received the B.E. degree in electromagnetic field and microwave technology from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 2016, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Department of Electronic Science and Engineering. His current research interests include antenna radar cross-section reduction and metasurfaces.

Feng Yang

Feng Yang was born in Shaanxi, China. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electromagnetic field and microwave technology from University of Electronic Science and Tech- nology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. He is currently a Professor with the School of Electronic Science and Engineering, UESTC. He has published more than 100 journal articles His research interests include antenna theory and techniques, electromagnetic scattering and inverse scattering, and UWB communication

Jianhua Yang

Jianhua Yang was born in Guizhou, China, in 1994. He received the B.S. degree from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 2016, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Department of Electronic Science and Engineering. His current research interests include antenna design, antenna array synthesis, and optimization techniques.

Xiyuan Zhu

Xiyuan Zhu was born in Guizhou, China, in 1997. He received the B.E. degree in electromagnetic field and microwave technology from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 2019, where he is currently pursuing the M.S. degree with the Department of Electronic Science and Engineering. His current research interests include antenna radar cross-section reduction and low-scattering platform design.