SWISSto12 has been awarded funding from the European Space Agency's ARTES program to develop and test additive manufactured satellite user antennas (i.e. user terminal front ends). Cobham Antenna Systems joins the project with in kind contributions and is exploring, with SWISSto12 on how additive manufactured antennas could fit in to its future product portfolio.
Additive Manufacturing refers to a process by which digital 3D design data is used to build up a component in layers by depositing material. This is often done using 3D Printers.
The use of additive manufacturing for satellite user antennas is of particular interest for emerging high data throughput satellite telecommunication services in the Ju and Ka bands where traditional user antennas are currently complex and costly to product. This collaborative project aims at showing significant weight and cost reduction for Ku and Ka band satellite user antennas. This improvement will contribute to larger scale market penetration of high data rate satellite connectivity services.
