UK team develops analogue self steered antennas

The aim of the18 month project is to develop a completely self contained, solid state, self steering antenna that is much lighter and less power hungry than current alternatives. Work will commence on a 1.6GHz demonstrator capable of providing transfer rates of 0.5Mb/s and with a power requirement of just 2W. It's anticipated that the device will ultimately have the capability to operate at 20-30GHz in order to provide much greater bandwidth. The current design is a 4 x 5 element planar array measuring 30 x 40cm and 12mm deep. The circuits are entirely analogue and incorporate specially adapted phase locked loop circuits. By contrast, conventional circuits convert incoming signals to digital, process them electronically and then convert them back to analogue. According to Dr Neil Buchanan, pictured, lead engineer on the project, this limits their frequency, and increases their complexity, cost and power requirements. "The work is especially exciting because it has involved taking a piece of pure university research and bringing it into the real world," said Dr Buchanan. "We believe that self tracking antennas offer the prospect of much simpler and more cost effective alternatives to other current approaches. That, we believe, makes them ideally suited to a variety of end uses. "For example, satellite broadband aircraft antennas are extremely complex. They need to be linked into the plane's onboard navigation system in order to find the satellite. In trains and road vehicles, they consume a lot of power and they require mechanical parts for tracking purposes." Dr Buchanan believes that across these applications the solution he is currently working on could reduce power consumption by a factor of 10, weight by a factor of five and cost by a factor of four. "It clearly has a lot of potential," he concluded.