Academic literature on the topic 'Small aperture active phased array'

Conformal antenna arrays have been studied for several years but only few examples of applications in modern radar or communication systems may be found up to date due to technological difficulties. The objective of the “Electronic Radar with Conformal Array Antenna” (ERAKO) demonstrator system which has been developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR) is to demonstrate the feasibility of an active electronically scanned antenna for conformal integration into small and medium sized airborne platforms. For practical trials the antenna has been adapted for operation with the Phased Array Multifunctional Imaging Radar (PAMIR) system developed at the institute. The antenna in combination with the PAMIR front-end needed to undergo a special calibration procedure for beam forming and imaging post-processing. The present paper describes the design and development of the conformal antenna array of the demonstrator system, its connection to the PAMIR system and results of recently conducted synthetic aperture radar (SAR) experiments.

An X-band active phased array horn antenna with high power capacity and high peak power is proposed in this paper. At the horn aperture, the baffles are loaded to suppress higher-order modes and eliminate blind spots during beam scanning. Straight walls are added to improve impedance matching. Considering that the peak power that T/R modules can provide is very limited, the proposal of a dual-port waveguide breaks through the bottleneck of the power capacity of a single-port input for the first time. The proposed curved dual-port waveguide is used to connect the horn antenna and the T/R module, which is verified to improve the power capacity of the overall internal structure. Simulated and measured results show that VSWR ≤ 2 in the frequency range of 7.5–8.5 GHz. There is no grating lobe in the ±10° scanning range and the maximum gain drop does not exceed 0.4 dB. The power capacity of the proposed HPM array is 56.34 MW. The phased array antenna has the characteristics of flexible scanning, small size, and high gain, and can be applied in high-power microwave systems.

SUMMARY A mid-aperture broad-band test array (OBS array DOCTAR) was deployed from June 2011 to April 2012 about 100 km north of the Gloria fault in the Eastern North Atlantic in about 5000 m water depth. In addition arrays were installed on Madeira Island and in western Portugal mainland. For the first time in the Eastern North Atlantic, we recorded a large number of high frequency Po and So waves from local and regional small and moderate earthquakes (ML < 4). An incoherent beamforming method was adapted to scan continuous data for such Po and So arrivals applying a sliding window waveform migration and frequency–wavenumber technique. We identify about 320 Po and 1550 So arrivals and compare the phase onsets with the ISC catalogue (ISC 2015) for the same time span. Up to a distance of 6° to the DOCTAR stations all events listed in the ISC catalogue could be associated to Po and So phases. Arrivals from events in more than 10° distance could be identified only in some cases. Only few Po and/or So arrivals were detected for earthquakes from the European and African continental area, the continental shelf regions and for earthquakes within or northwest of the Azores plateau. Unexpectedly, earthquake clusters are detected within the oceanic plates north and south of the Gloria fault and far from plate boundaries, indicating active intraplate structures. We also observe and locate numerous small magnitude earthquakes on the segment of the Gloria fault directly south of DOCTAR, which likely coincides with the rupture of the 25 November 1941 event. Local small magnitude earthquakes located beneath DOCTAR show hypocentres up to 30 km depth and strike-slip focal mechanisms. A comparison with detections at temporary mid-aperture arrays on Madeira and in western Portugal shows that the deep ocean array performs much better than the island and the continental array regarding the detection threshold for events in the oceanic plates. We conclude that sparsely distributed mid-aperture seismic arrays in the deep ocean could decrease the detection and location threshold for seismicity with ML < 4 in the oceanic plate and might constitute a valuable tool to monitor oceanic plate seismicity.