IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

13, 2014

1325

Multiband Dual-Polarization High-Efficiency Array

Feed for Ku/Reverse-Band Satellite Communications
Zhenchao Yang, Student Member, IEEE, and Karl F. Warnick, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractA dual-band dual-polarized planar passive phased

array feed was designed and simulated, with four highly isolated
ports and polarizations. The feed design provides an important feasibility demonstration for the deployment of a satellite
transponder that transmits a downlink signal at 17.317.8 GHz,
referred to as reverse band (RB), in the same orbital slot as an
existing Ku-band satellite. The design utilizes a multilayer printed
circuit board (PCB) to separate the complex feed distribution
networks required for the four-port antenna. Simulation results
indicate that the feed receives signals in dual linear polarization
at Ku-band and dual circular polarization at RB with isolation
between all ports better than 20 dB. With the feed illuminating a
reflector antenna, the aperture illumination and radiation efficiencies are approximately 70% and 80%, respectively, for all ports,
representing one of the most complex yet efficient reported planar
array feed designs in the literature.
Index TermsAntenna efficiency, dual-polarization antenna,
multiband antenna, planar array feed, satellite communications.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE DIRECT-BROADCAST satellite (DBS) market

demands more downlink bandwidth than is available
in the existing Ku (11.712.7 GHz) and Ka (18.320.2 GHz)
bands. To meet this need, the International Telecommunication
Union allocated 17.317.8 GHz as a downlink broadcast band
in 1992, and the service was recently approved by the U.S.
Federal Communications Commission. This application of
the 17.317.8-GHz band is referred to reverse band (RB) to
distinguish the downlink service from the existing use of this
band for DBS feeder uplinks. Because this new service could
lead to station-to-station interference problems at both the earth
and space ends, multiple investigations have been carried out
to resolve technical issues surrounding RB implementation [1].
To utilize the new band, a new satellite with RB transponders
must be launched. Geostationary orbital slots are a rare resource
and expensive to occupy. If the new satellite could be collocated with an existing Ku-band satellite, the RB service could
be introduced without requiring a new orbital slot. The key technical development required to enable this opportunity is a dish
antenna feed for terrestrial terminals with phase centers of the

Manuscript received May 16, 2014; revised June 26, 2014; accepted June
29, 2014. Date of publication July 09, 2014; date of current version July 21,
2014. This work was supported by Linear Signal LLC. (Corresponding author:
Zhenchao Yang.)
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84058 USA, (e-mail: yzcown@gmail.
com; warnick@ee.byu.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2014.2335693

Ku-band and RB feeds at the same focal point and high isolation
between bands.
The required multiband feed must provide dual linear polarization (LP) in Ku-band and dual circular polarization (CP)
in RB. Multiband horn feeds are widely used in some applications [2], but the horn solution has complex machined feeding
structures and high fabrication cost, and the phase center can
shift with frequency. Planar passive array feeds have been introduced as a potential substitute for horn feeds due to low cost,
low profile, easy fabrication, and the convenience for integration with low noise block (LNB) circuits [3], [4]. Multiband
dual-polarization planar arrays have been developed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) [5], [6] and remote sensing [7]. For
the Ku/RB application, the small separation between bands, the
need for multiple polarizations, specified radiation pattern shape
to feed a reflector, and high radiation efficiency make this an unusually challenging antenna design problem.
To meet these requirements, a dual-band dual-polarized
planar passive phased array feed was designed and simulated,
with four highly isolated ports and dual polarizations at each
band. To feed the antenna, a multilayer PCB technique was
used. This raises an important research question regarding
the achievable radiation efficiency of an antenna array with
complex multilayer feed network. In Section II, the general
configuration and concepts of the array feed are described first.
Based on careful material selection with a focus on jointly
maximizing antenna efficiency and manufacturability, the
antenna element designs, the stripline distribution networks,
and the complete stack-up configuration are presented. The
simulation process for optimizing the illumination pattern is
detailed as well. Section III provides various simulation results
on the antenna and its corresponding system performance, and
Section IV draws a conclusion for this work.
II. MULTIBAND ARRAY FEED DESIGN
A. Array Feed Design Concepts
Conventional multiband planar arrays use stacked patch [7]
or perforated patch elements [5]. For satellite communications, high radiation efficiency and high isolation are required.
Stacked and perforated patches may have poor radiation efficiency, and for multiband arrays, if the element spacing is
optimized for one band, it is suboptimal for the other. Moreover, the low frequency ratio (1.439) of the Ku and RB satellite
downlink bands makes high isolation difficult to achieve for
collocated arrays. An interleaved array design is therefore superior to conventional approaches for the Ku/RB feed application.

1536-1225 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

1326

Fig. 1. Cavity-backed patch antenna layout for both bands with dimensions:
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
, and
. Values are in millimeters.

The feed design goal is to illuminate a dish with

0.60.9
efficiently. Based on [3], the 2 2 planar array configuration
was chosen due to its simplicity and high efficiency. To obtain
collocated phase centers, an interleaved configuration for Ku
and RB elements was adopted as shown in Fig. 1. In this way,
the element distance for each band can be optimized independently to obtain the correct illumination pattern for the specified
reflector geometry.
For microstrip-type antennas, a thick substrate is preferred
to obtain high radiation efficiency and wide bandwidth [8]. On
the other hand, distribution networks require a moderately thin
substrate to avoid wide transmission lines, reduce radiation
loss, and achieve low coupling between branches. Because
of this conflict of substrate thickness preference and also the
complexity of implementing independent distribution networks
for each band and polarization, a multilayer printed circuit
board (PCB) technique was adopted.
B. Ku and RB Antenna Element Designs
For a feed antenna, the overall performance is determined
by the port input impedance, spillover efficiency, aperture efficiency, and radiation efficiency. Of these, a decrease in radiation efficiency has the largest detrimental impact on sensitivity
since loss in the antenna structure adds thermal noise and attenuates the received signal. Considering loss of planar antennas is
strongly influenced by copper surface roughness and dielectric
properties of the substrate, RO3003 laminate (Rogers, Inc.) was
chosen as the substrate due to its low dielectric constant, low
loss tangent, smooth copper foil, and small thermal expansion
coefficient.

IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014

In the interleaved array configuration, the issue of coupling

between Ku and RB patches arises because of the close distance. Coupling not only wastes the received power, but also
deforms beam patterns. Compared to conventional patch antennas, cavity-backed patch antennas have better isolation, confining the fringing field on radiating sides and eliminating surface-wave modes [9]. Additionally, low cross polarization and
good pattern shape can be maintained while taking advantage
of a thick substrate for high radiation efficiency and wide bandwidth [8]. The locations of feeding pins are on the center axes
to excite symmetric orthogonal modes for good isolation and
can be adjusted for impedance matching. A shorting pin was
added at the center of each patch and extended to layers beneath
the antenna array to suppress parallel-plate modes and improve
impedance matching.
Simulations were conducted using IMST EMPIRE XCcel
based on the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method.
Dielectric and conductor loss effects were taken into account.
Specifically, surface roughness of copper foils was modeled
since roughness can lead to significant loss as frequency increases. All these considerations result in a precise efficiency
estimate, which has been verified in [8] by some rigorous
reverberation chamber measurements. To speed up the simulation, modeling the cavities and the following channelized
stripline networks was simplified by using metal walls instead
of numerous vias to connect upper and lower grounds. In the
optimization process, two parameters, the antenna substrate
thickness and the cavity size, are particularly important. A
smaller cavity or a thinner substrate confines the field more
tightly, leading to lower cross polarization and coupling, but
both radiation efficiency and bandwidth decrease. Finally,
60-mil thickness was chosen for the antenna substrate. The
optimized Ku and RB elements are shown in Fig. 1.
C. Distribution Network Designs
Channelized striplines were chosen for all networks due
to the superior shielding property, which maintains the good
isolation and radiation patterns of the array feed. One drawback is that substrates have to be hollowed to feed grounded
coplanar waveguides (GCPWs) transformed from striplines.
If integrating the feed with LNB circuits, direct transitions
from striplines to microstrips on the circuit layer can be made.
Corporate feed networks were adopted for both bands so the
phase of each element can be kept the same across the operating
band. Quarter-wavelength impedance transformers were used
at every T-junction. For the RB network, four hybrids were
used after element feeding pins to form dual CP. Although
sequential rotational configuration could have improved the
axial ratio, it is not practical with a single-layer feed network
and may not be as effective for array feeds as it is for aperture
arrays.
The thickness for each stripline substrate is 20 mil, which
takes into consideration both stripline width for easy routing
and loss for high efficiency. FEP (Dupont, Inc.) with the lowest
loss tangent among common bonding materials was used in the
two stripline subassemblies to satisfy the critical loss requirement. Thickness of 2 mil is chosen because it can cover copper
patterning while avoiding via failure due to thermal expansion.

YANG AND WARNICK: MULTIBAND DUAL-POLARIZATION HIGH-EFFICIENCY ARRAY FEED FOR Ku/REVERSE-BAND SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS

1327

Fig. 2. Distribution network layouts for (a) Ku band and (b) RB. Dimensions:
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
, and
. Values are in millimeters.

The final layouts of the Ku and RB feed networks are shown in

Fig. 2(a) and (b).
D. Complete Dual Ku/RB Array Feed
To feed the antenna elements from the two stripline subassemblies correctly, the feeding via stubs underneath striplines
must be kept as short as possible, which can be realized by
sequential lamination and back-drilling techniques. To bond the
antenna substrate and two stripline subassemblies in sequential
lamination, 2929 bondply (Rogers, Inc.) was chosen because
it is a thermal set prepreg that no longer flows after its first
lamination cycle and has the cure temperature lower than the
FEP melt point. Four-mil 2929 is needed to provide sufficient
bonding strength between the ground layers. To reduce the
complexity of the passive structures needed for the CP feed
network and avoid intersections between feeding vias and
striplines, the Ku-band network was arranged between the
antenna and the RB stripline network. The complete array
structure is shown in Fig. 3.
E. Feed Pattern Optimization
The ideal reflector illumination pattern should be similar
to the curve
with appropriate taper at the dish rim.
Larger taper reduces spillover noise, whereas smaller taper
increases aperture efficiency. Although 10-dB taper at the
edge of the reflector is a common rule of thumb, better performance can be obtained by optimizing the antenna pattern
for a particular dish geometry. For the 2 2 dual-band array,
the illumination pattern can be controlled by adjusting element
spacing.
To optimize element distances for the best illumination pattern, the array feed must be simulated with a reflector. This was
accomplished by forming the primary patterns using an FDTD
code and modeling reflection from the dish using the physical
optics approximation as shown in Fig. 4. Electronics noise was
included using microwave network theory following [10]. This
hybrid model was then embedded in the same built-in optimizer
in EMPIRE, and the design was tuned to maximize the overall
system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The optimized array configuration for an
of 0.9 is shown in Fig. 1. The distances

Fig. 3. Stack-up configuration of the Ku/RB array and feed networks.

Fig. 4. Optimization flowchart for on-reflector simulation.

between elements for Ku-band and RB are 14.7 mm (

at
12.2 GHz) and 9.7 mm (
at 17.55 GHz), respectively.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
Following optimizations of the array layout, the complete
model of the dual-band array feed was simulated. The -parameters of all four ports are shown in Fig. 5. For Ku-band, the
10-dB impedance bandwidth achieves 640 MHz from 12.15 to
12.79 GHz, and the coupling between all ports is below 20 dB.
Since hybrids were used in RB, the coupling between two CP
ports is more meaningful than the reflection. The 15-dB bandwidth is 350 MHz, from 17.47 to 17.82 GHz. Other coupling
levels are below 26 dB. Directivity patterns are illustrated
in Fig. 6. Compared to the RB array, the Ku-band array has a
narrower beamwidth, lower cross-polarization level, and higher
sidelobe level.
Efficiencies and overall system sensitivity for the array-fed
reflector are listed in Table I. Efficiency definitions follow the
IEEE standard for antenna terms [11]. In particular, antenna efficiency is the ratio of the maximum effective area to the aperture

1328

IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014

power intercepted by the reflector to the radiated power from

the feed. The inverse sensitivity
is a convenient receiver figure of merit that is independent of the dish size. The
parameters of low noise amplifiers (LNAs) in the receiver were
set to industry standard values with 0.8 dB
. The radiation efficiency is approximately 80% for all four ports. To our
knowledge, these are the highest simulated radiation efficiencies reported to date for such a complex multilayer antenna array
design.
IV. CONCLUSION

Fig. 5. -parameters of the dual Ku/RB array: (a) Ku vertical polarized port;
(b) Ku horizontal polarized port; (c) RB left-hand CP (LHCP) port; (d) RB righthand CP (RHCP) port.

This letter presents the first reported planar array feed design
for collocated Ku/RB dual-polarization satellite communications. With the proposed array feed on ground terminals, a new
RB satellite can be launched to share the same orbital slot with
an existing Ku-band satellite. Simulation results have demonstrated that this planar array feed is promising for dual-band
receiving with good isolation between ports and high efficiencies for all four ports. The key development of this work is that
careful attention to details in feed network design and material
selection makes the critical difference between a planar antenna
that does not approach viability in manufacturability or systemlevel receiver sensitivity and one that meets industry standard
performance requirements for satellite communications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors appreciate suggestions from D. Doyle on material selection and multilayer PCB fabrication.
REFERENCES

Fig. 6. Directivity patterns of the dual Ku/RB array: (a) Ku vertical polarized
port; (b) Ku horizontal polarized port; (c) RB LHCP port; (d) RB RHCP port.

TABLE I
SIMULATED ARRAY FEED EFFICIENCIES AND SYSTEM PERFORMANCE

area, aperture illumination efficiency is the ratio of the maximum directivity to the standard directivity, and radiation efficiency is the ratio of the total radiated power to the net accepted
power. For the reflector antenna under consideration, it follows
that
, and we neglect the effects of surface roughness and feed blockage. Spillover efficiency is the ratio of the

[1] H. Kobayashi, H. Shinonaga, N. Araki, and Y. Ito, Study on interference between non-GSO MSS gateway station and GSO FSS earth
station under reverse band operation, in Proc. 10th Int. Conf. Digital
Satell. Commun., 1995, vol. 1, pp. 282289.
[2] J. Teng, S. Yang, and Z. Nie, Study on multiple frequencies and polarizations feed technique in Luneberg lens antenna, in Proc. ISPACS,
2010, pp. 14.
[3] Z. Yang and K. F. Warnick, A planar passive dual band array feed
antenna for Ku band satellite communication terminals, in Proc. IEEE
APSURSI, 2012, pp. 12.
[4] T.-L. Chen and H.-S. Wu, Dual-polarized planar reflector feed for
direct broadcast satellite systems, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag.
Lett., vol. 9, pp. 693696, 2010.
[5] L. Shafai, W. Chamma, M. Barakat, P. Strickland, and G. Seguin,
Dual-band dual-polarized perforated microstrip antennas for SAR applications, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 5866,
Jan. 2000.
[6] R. Pokuls, J. Uher, and D. Pozar, Dual-frequency and dual-polarization microstrip antennas for SAR applications, IEEE Trans. Antennas
Propag., vol. 46, no. 9, pp. 12891296, Sep. 1998.
[7] K. Kona, M. Manteghi, and Y. Rahmat-Samii, A novel dual-frequency
dual-polarized stacked patch microstrip array feed for remote sensing
reflector antennas, Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 48, no. 7, pp.
12501258, 2006.
[8] Z. Yang, K. F. Warnick, and C. L. Holloway, A high radiation efficiency microstrip array feed for Ku band satellite communication, in
Proc. IEEE APSURSI, 2013, pp. 12.
[9] M. Awida and A. Fathy, Design guidelines of substrate-integrated
cavity backed patch antennas, Microw., Antennas, Propag., vol. 6, no.
2, pp. 151157, 2012.
[10] K. F. Warnick et al., Design and characterization of an active
impedance matched low noise phased array feed, IEEE Trans.
Antennas Propag., vol. 59, no. 6, pp. 18761885, Jun. 2011.
[11] IEEE standard for definitions of terms for antennas, IEEE Std 1452013 (Revision of IEEE Std 145-1993), 2014, 138.