On 21/3/19 4:44 pm, Norman Yarvin wrote:
On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 11:14:05PM -0400, Henry Spencer wrote:I'd think having the plane of the conductive solar panel floating around near the emitter would perhaps get in the way of what you're suggesting?
On Wed, 20 Mar 2019, Norman Yarvin wrote:The popularity of antennas that purposefully put radiating elements in
It's routine in radios to have a very directional beam produced by anMy understanding is that the beam-forming performance deteriorates rather
antenna that has a number of radiating elements straight in line with
the direction the beam is to travel, the Yagi antenna being a common
example. I'm not sure what the downsides are, numerically, for emitting
edge-on from a planar array of microwave transmitters...
badly as the beam direction approaches the plane of the surface, which is
why phased-array radars usually have multiple arrays when really wide
angular coverage is needed.
line with the target is a pretty good indication that there's no
fundamental obstacle, though. Even edge-on, the basic principle of
having emitters all interfere constructively in one direction and
destructively in others still applies. That's not to say that there
are no obstacles, of course; there obviously are, due to things like
the emitting elements in phased array radars normally being mounted on
a conductive metal surface which messes with the beam if one tries to
shine it at too sharp an angle. But such secondary obstacles can be
engineered around. While one normally wants a conductive shield to
protect people inside the radar installation from high RF levels, on a
powersat a lightweight fiberglass truss could be used. Another
obvious obstacle is that individual emitting elements don't radiate
uniformly in three dimensions; if a dipole is oriented vertically, for
instance, it radiates mainly horizontally and zero straight up and
down. (And that's what they call an "omnidirectional" antenna.) To
get around such blind spots, each emitter could have two or three
antennas and switch between them.
One might not want to pay the price for engineering around such
secondary obstacles, but that's different from it being impossible.