Recently, members of the Kymeta team contributed to a white paper presenting a full duplex Ku Satcom user terminal, which uses a metasurface antenna and holographic beamforming.

A new age of satellite connectivity has emerged in the last few years and a new space race is on with advanced GEO and MEO satellites and large LEO constellations. Given some of the prominent satellite internet plans proposed in recent years, we may not be far off from tens of thousands of satellites orbiting overhead.

The metasurface antenna explored in this paper is operated through holographic beam forming that has been developed to meet performance, size, weight, cost and power requirements for mobile use cases. One of the key advantages of the metasurface antenna technology used in the Ku Satcom user terminal compared to traditional ESA technologies is the design flexibility it provides when it comes to integrating multiple frequency bands within the same physical aperture.

The terminal is ruggedized and enclosed for environmental protection with a radome and backshell from the front and back. The metasurface design was manufactured using flat panel display technology with liquid crystal as a tunable dielectric.

The unique ability the Tripleband Metasurface Antenna offers is that it allows the developed user terminal to cover the entire Ku Rx and Tx bands in a single aperture for full duplex operation, making the user terminal an innovative solution for mobile SATCOM use cases.

To read the full paper authored by Kymeta’s Mohsen Sazegar, Ibrahim Nassar, Chris Eylander, Amin Momeni, and Ryan Stevenson and learn more about its findings, click here.