Full Duplex SATCOM ESA With Switchable Polarization and Wide Tunable Bandwidth Using a Tripleband Metasurface Aperture

A full duplex Ku Satcom user terminal using a metasurface antenna and holographic beamforming is presented. The shared-aperture metasurface combines multiple sub-arrays to integrate receive and transmit antennas in a single physical aperture. To cover the entire receive band with a high gain, two receive sub-arrays are implemented. These two receive sub-array along the transmit sub-array result in a Tripleband Metasurface Aperture (TMA). Each TMA sub-array can form and steer a beam independently and simultaneously, while switching the frequency channel and polarization in software. The reconfigurable TMA is manufactured using flat panel display technology with liquid crystal as the tunable dielectric. With a circular radiative aperture, 82cm in diameter, a maximum antenna gain of 35.9dBi in receive and 34.9dBi in transmit are achieved in full duplex mode. The user terminal provides a wide scan range of ±75° in 2D and fast tracking (~30°/sec) with antenna power consumption of only 35 W. Furthermore, an integrated multi-WAN 3G & LTE provides seamless connectivity between satellite and terrestrial networks.