Raytheon Company

Samuel De La Torre

Kenneth William Brown

Alan Rattray

Travis B Feenstra

Johan A Kullstam

Arlin L Pierce

Steerable antenna on platforms, fixed or mobile, are tracked to form an RF communication link by setting the width of the main lobe of the antenna beam pattern to be greater than the initial pointing uncertainty region and then concurrently scanning and progressively reducing the widths of the main lobes as the pointing uncertainty region is reduced to first acquire and then track the opposing antenna. The width of the main lobe is reduced such that the width of the main lobe is approximately fixed for each block. The antennas at opposite ends of the communication link may be scanned with scan patterns that are orthogonal to each other such that the demodulation of the received signal levels to signal direction of arrival at each platform is solely a function of the scan pattern of the receive antenna.

Method of tracking steerable antennas on platforms to form an RF communication link

A low-loss band and polarization-selectable gender-selectable transceiver for use with a reflector-type antenna suitable for the E-band frequency allocation as well as other RF bands in which the upper and lower bands are separated by a stop band. In addition to providing the gender-selectable combination of the upper and lower bands for transmit and receive, this topology allows for the selection of transmit, and receive polarizations. A transceiver may transmit and receive on the same or on orthogonal polarizations. Paired transceivers may transmit on the same or on orthogonal polarizations. This is accomplished by integrating a rotatable polarizer (e.g. a &#xbc; wave plate) and a polarization duplexer (e.g. an orthomode transducer) in a FDD (Frequency-Domain Duplexed) system. The rotatable polarizer allows for selection of both transmit and receive bands and polarizations.

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La Habra, CA, United States of America

Samuel De La Torre