Simultaneous Multibeam Operation in 19.5 GHz SATCOM Receive Phased Arrays using Orthogonally-Coded Nested Subarrays

This paper presents a novel approach to generating multiple simultaneous beams from a single phased array aperture and a single RF signal path. Simultaneous beam patterns can be synthesized using orthogonal block codes applied to non-overlapping subarrays of the full aperture, extracting the radiation characteristics of each individual subarray. The validity of this approach is demonstrated with randomly thinned nested (or interleaved) subarrays using a 19.5 GHz 1024-element receive array. Measurements show that the subarray patterns can be extracted with better than 40 dB isolation using 8-bit encoding. This work enables multibeam operation in low-cost and low-complexity phased array systems.