SIGINT Drone Formation Including Plannar Phased-Array Antenna

In this paper, we propose a drone formation system consisting of a phased-array antenna for signal information collection (SIGINT) systems. The proposed SIGINT system operates at high altitudes by mounting antenna elements on drones that can collect signal information on the Korean Peninsula through long-range radio line-of-sight (LOS) communication. To collect the signals generated in various bands, the proposed SIGINT system employs a shared-aperture array antenna operating in three different bands. Bands 1, 2, and 3 consisted of 64(16×4), 256(32×8), and 1,024(64×16) elements, respectively, and were mounted on a drone. In this configuration, drones with antenna elements form a structure that changes according to the operational purpose of the system. The elements of bands 1, 2, and 3 had bandwidths of 38.8 %, 35.3 %, and 28.6 %, respectively, based on −3 dB. When the main beam with four drones was steered from 0°to 40°in the tracking mode, the array factors (AFs) in the bore-sight direction of the three bands were greater than 45.8, 57.9, and 69.4 dB, respectively.