A METHOD OF DESIGNING FEED-ARRAY EXCITATION COEFFICIENTS FOR ARRAY-FED REFLECTOR-TYPE RECONFIGURABLE BEAM ANTENNAS

Reconfigurable beam antennas are suitable for onboard antennas from th e point of view of frequency reuse, satellite power utilization, and f lexibility for traffic demand variation. In this paper, an efficient d esign method of the feed-array excitation coefficients for array-fed r eflector-type reconfigurable beam antennas is proposed. The feed-array is composed of several subarrays, and only amplitude between subarray s is controlled to achieve reconfigurability. Excitation coefficients of subarrays and amplitude between subarrays are determined efficientl y by the proposed design method. The method is verified by a design ex ample for an international communications satellite application.