“Our current transmitter can deliver over a kilowatt of continuous power at distances exceeding 100 meters,” said company co-founder and CTO Behrooz Abiri. “For persistent operations, the system must be capable of delivering at least 500W to an aerial vehicle at distances beyond 50meters, enabling its onboard battery to recharge while the drone remains in flight.”
The company founders and its technology come from CalTec.
Operating at 26GHz, the array has hierarchical constriction.
Its basic unit is a custom RFIC driving four patch antennas positioned immediately next to the IC. Two of these units are created at a time on a small rectangular substrate (image left).
200 of these substrates are then mounted on a square PCB to form a ’tile’ that has a 20 x 20 array of ICs, and, due to the chosen geometry, a 40 x 40 array of evenly-spaced antennas.
In reality, there are 368 rather than 400 basic units on each tile as room has to be made for ancillary electronics.
Tiles are assembled edge-to-edge to form the necessary array.
“Our architecture can be adapted to arrays of any size, and tailored to meet the power, distance and mission requirements of the systems we support,” said Abiri.
To effectively receive the power, the drone would also be fitted with a steerable phased array, but not as large as the transmitter’s array.
The company has also developed software to steer and focus the beam, or beams, and has demonstrated one of its antennas keeping a sub-9kg drone in the air for over 96 hours, it said.
Military surveillance and reconnaissance are amongst the applications envisaged.
Find Guru Wireless on this web page, which has little detail at the time of writing.
On the subject of fine-grained phased arrays, Electronics Weekly is not sure of the exact number of antennas in the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, but Kasdon electronics in the UK is assembling 180,000 PCB for it.
