Direct Radiating Arrays for Satellite Communications via Aperiodic Tilings

This paper presents an innovative Direct Radiating Array (DRA) architecture exploiting aperiodic tilings of the plane. In particular, a pinwheel tiling has been selected in order to fix positions of the different radiating sources, which are constituted by properly shaped elements. Such a choice allows to achieve a good aperture efficiency and very low pseudo-grating lobes while using only two different kinds of radiating elements. Preliminary results are shown and discussed with reference to both cases wherein the single tiles are not fully populated and wherein ad-hoc sub-array radiators are used. The very encouraging results achieved leave open the way for further interesting possibilities.