I appreciate the seamless process of viewing radiation patterns and boresight gain diagrams on the screen of the MVG lab computer. I can almost immediately compare them to previous measurements that I did in MVG, effortlessly seeing and evaluating the progress of our feed antenna.
THE CHALLENGE
HPS-GmbH is the premier space subsystems specialist with over 2 decades of experience serving the industrial space community around the globe. This organization is skilled in developing turn-key subsystems for satellites or spacecraft, mainly large deployable reflectors, subsystem integrals, and individual elements of systems be it the mechanical, thermal, or electrical parts. The experience and solid track record HPS-GmbH has developed over the years, is precisely why their client sought HPS-GmbH’s expertise in designing a reflector antenna solution for a satellite-based remote sensing application.
The biggest challenge associated with developing this antenna was to precisely capture the antenna performance and optimize the electrical parameters over a 10 GHz bandwidth from 2 GHz to 12 GHz. Having highly accurate measurement results over the entire frequency range is crucial in achieving a model that can be representative of the antenna’s behavior in a simulation environment. “We needed this characterization data, so that we could proceed with a high level of confidence.” Francesco Leone, an RF antenna engineer with HPS-GmbH shared, “This was a mid-stage effort to help compare our antenna model with real testing (i.e. we needed to determine the uncertainty of our antenna probe model).” Without an accurate model, the design process would be relegated to a matter of interactive testing of prototypes that could take months or years to optimize and at great cost. HPS-GmbH needed an accurate model of the antenna feed to aid in the design of the reflector structure, and ultimately, the complete reflector antenna design.
