ARTES-5.1 – ESA Telecom Technology Workplan ... - Emits - ESA

Annex 2Page 50Ref. Activity Title Procurement Policy Budget(KEUR)7-.015(09.153.20)Objective:Description:Planned TenderIssueDistributed receive antenna for vehicles Open Competitive Tender Type: C1 500 Priority 2 18To design, manufacture and test a prototype of a receive antenna made of distributed radiators on the vehicle surface for user access to mobile services in L/S band.Estimated Duration(months)Mobile terminal antennas for data applications in the L- and S- frequency bands can be difficult to integrate aesthetically into vehicular designs due to their size and shape. The possibility todistribute radiators (sensors) can provide an extra degree of freedom to ease the integration process and to ensure that the car structure design is not compromised. Applying digital beamforming can offer exactly this. Moreover, distributed radiators combined by a digital beam forming network can provide an attractive solution for medium gain antennas (increasing theantenna aperture) to overcome the multipath and shadowing effects experienced in mobile environments, in particular rural and urban areas.In digital beamforming antennas, each radiator is equipped with a separate LNB, down-conversion, analogue-to-digital converter and some signal processing circuitry. The network combiningthe signal from the various sensors is implemented in digital domain. As such, signal loss over transmission lines is not an issue and the patches can be totally separated from each other(unlike in conventional array antennas). However, care must be taken in this case that grating lobes, and thus interference, do not present any problems for the receive system.This activity will design a medium gain receive antenna operating in either L- or S-band. The radiating elements of the array antenna will be distributed on the available surface and employdigital beam forming. A prototype will be manufactured and tested in a laboratory environment.In the ongoing ARTES 5 activity "Cost optimised high performance active receive phased array antenna for mobile terminals" the radiating elements are within one wavelength of each other,while the radiating elements will be far apart in this activity.NOTE: This activity has been designated as "Priority 2". Priority 2 activities will only be initiated on the explicit request of at least one delegation.