PESAs

Updated January 23, 2010

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PESA is an acronym for passive electronically steered antenna. PESAs are often created using MEMS phase shifters. PESAs are the poor cousins of AESAs, which have superior performance at a higher price. The word "pesa" could just as well have originated at some boardroom meeting of a Fortune 5 military contractor...

The customer can't afford one of our AESAs to make the cost bogie, but we have to have something that is electronically steerable, even if its' a piece of #$%&! Didn't we fire all the MEMS guys but one? Get him on the speakerphone!

What are the advantages of a PESA over an AESA? Presumably it is cheaper to make, because the only circuitry you need to provide at the element is a phase shifter; the amplification takes place downstream in the feed network. Also, there's a good chance you don't need to provide a separate calibration table between transmit and receive, because the paths will have the same phase in transmit and receive. This is a very good thing, because MEMS phase shifters need at least one microsecond to switch state, which blanks out more than 300 yards of distance if you had to switch them on every pulse.

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