Abstract: Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSATs) are commonly used worldwide in video, data and voice applications such
as rural telephony, distance education, military communications, disaster recovery and DBS TV. The main constraint of VSAT systems is their antenna. The antennas used in contemporary VSAT systems are
parabolic reflector antennas which are expensive and difficult to carry around.

Various efforts have been made to replace the bulky antennas in VSAT systems with planar microstrip antenna arrays which will be low-cost, portable and conformal. The planar arrays used in contemporary communication systems suffer from narrow bandwidth, low gain and poor isolation due to mutual coupling between the elements
of the array. This research is aimed at designing of planar antenna arrays for VSAT communication systems. The goal of the research is to design a large conformal planar antenna array to achieve a high
gain, maintaining high isolation between the TX and RX ports as well as low side-lobes. The antenna array system will have dual-band operation in S- and C- bands to cover the Intelsat and ST1 services.
A very high gain of the order of 28 dBi and good isolation (of the order of 30 dB) are aimed for the proposed array system. The issue of mutual coupling between the elements of the antenna array is focused and theoretical modeling of the system is proposed using full wave methods.

About the Speaker: Furqan is a Research Student with the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering