W-band RFE

Status

Completed
Status date

2025-06-19
Activity Code

5C.432

Objectives

The objective of this activity was to design, manufacture and test an integrated W-band receive front-end (RFE), for future telecommunication payloads.

Through analysis and breadboard trials, the design solution most capable of meeting the requirements was selected. Based on this a W-band Radio Frequency (RF) receive front-end breadboard was designed, manufactured and tested to fully evaluate the concepts and technologies.

The activity reached its target Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 4.

Benefits

The utilisation of the spectrum available in W-band, for communications in future very high throughput satellite systems, will significantly increase the system capacity, reduce the number of gateway earth stations and consequently improve the overall economics of the system.
A conventional distributed architecture for the front-end receive subsystem leads to a high noise figure at W-band, which degrades the
quality of the communications uplink. This activity, covered the development of a compact, integrated, W-band RF front-end receiver,
including a waveguide transition, a monolithic septum polariser, a bandpass filter and a dual-polarisation low noise amplifier, thus overcoming the problems linked to distributed architectures.

Features