Integrated transmit/receive antenna with arbitrary utilisation of the antenna aperture and plural transmit subarrays

摘要

The present invention discloses an antenna device and system design forming a modular common antenna surface having various surface portions for transmission and reception as well as integrated transmission and reception within the same common antenna surface, the various surface portions either forming passive or active arrays for transmission or reception. Additionally superimposed surface portions of the modular common antenna surface constitute individual transmit and receive array portions, respectively, sharing the total aperture, the modular common antenna surface producing at least one polarization plane for transmission and generally two orthogonal polarization planes for reception to achieve polarization diversity for the reception. Further the antenna surface of the device and system according to the invention generally form a microstrip module array containing a number of radiation element for transmission and/or reception, and consist of one or several columns of individual element forming the antenna aperture, the column and/or columns additionally in the preferred arrangement having integrated power amplifiers and/or low noise amplifiers (LNA:s), respectively.