Active Antennas

Haigh-Farr’s newly developed Electronically Steerable Array (ESA) antennas are designed for applications where one or more simultaneous, actively directed, RF energy patterns are necessary.  

From a technology perspective, these ESAs build on decades of proven digital array practices and move those fundamentals into modern 5G digital-era-chipsets.  They use easily connectable, modular, multi (single or dual pol) antenna element building blocks to construct arbitrary size, planar, multi-beam phased arrays which collect horizontal and/or vertical components of any RF signal within their predetermined frequency range and within the assembly’s electrical field-of-view.  RF signals from each element are conditioned, filtered, digitized and passed through FPGAs and processors running customized complex vector algorithms which provide beamforming functionality and coherent formed beams as outputs.  This architecture results in digital beamforming rather than simple RF beamforming; and the end result is a system that can be tailored for numerous applications where dynamic acquisition/auto-tracking of multiple data streams coming from multiple RF emitters simultaneously is needed.  As these emitters move the ESA stays locked onto the various signals for continuous RF coverage.

From a usage perspective, Haigh-Farr’s new ESA can be used for applications ranging from multi-faceted/multi-layered test scenarios where several bogeys and attack assets need to be acquired simultaneously to satellite or spacecraft operations where RF energy needs to maintain lock on multiple ground assets as the emitting vehicle orbits the Earth to drones needing to stay in communication with one or more airborne telemetry/command-and-control platforms as the entire acquisition scene moves across the sky.

Features of our current ESA offering include:

• S, L, and C-Band Operations
• Modular Design Tailorable to Achieve Required Gain, Directivity, and SNR
  
• Single or Dual Pol Configurations
  
• Simultaneous Auto-Tracking of Multiple Dynamic RF Sources
  

Applications

• Satellites
• Range Testing
  
• Drone Communications