Design and Analysis of a Reflectarray Using Slot Antenna Elements for Ka-band SatCom

This paper presents a folded reflectarray designed for Ka-band satellite communication applications. The array element is a dual-polarized slot antenna with multilayered PCB structure and is designed to operate at 29.5-30.8 GHz band for both transmitting and receiving with single linear polarization. Vias are employed to suppress the surface wave propagation and reduce the mutual coupling between adjacent array elements, for achieving a reflectarray with a wide scan angle range. An equivalent circuit model for the array element is developed and it agrees well with the EM simulation results. Several passive demonstrators consisting of 116 elements spaced by 0.5 lambda(30) (GHz) were fabricated and measured. The experimental results show that the presented reflectarray is capable of steering the beam up to +/- 60 degrees in both E- and H-planes with low cross-polarization level.