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Study Of Behavior Of Digital Modulations For Beam Steerable Reflectarray Antennas, Fuqin Xiong, Robert R. Romanofsky

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the bit error rate (BER) performance of digital modulations in a system with a scanning reflectarray antenna. A reflectarray causes intersymbol interference (ISI) in a digitally modulated signal, its phase shifters' phase errors cause signal distortion, and its phase shifters' phase transient causes beam pattern degradation during direction switching. In this paper, composite signal models of the reflectarray are established for both static and transient states. Due to different feed-to-element distances and the element-to-observation distances, different delays exist in signal components. These delays cause ISI whose effect is analyzed and evaluated. Effects of phase shifters' phase errors …