Power Combiner Connection Diagnostic Method for Active Electronically Scanned Array Antenna

This article proposes the diagnostic method for power combiner connection inside the active electronically scanned array (AESA) antenna without additional hardware for the measurement. To implement the inspection method, the side lobe blanking (SLB) antenna was used as the signal injection path for the TRM, and the software was designed to enable phase and amplitude comparison. The phase comparison uses the measured phase data of four representative TRMs of each monopulse quadrant and received signals of all TRMs were used for amplitude test. Before the test, effect of amplitude and phase imbalance of single quadrant has been conducted for determining threshold of the failure detection. And then, the threshold was optimized based on the test result of newly manufactured hardware. Test results on three antennas shows similar check result for each quadrants and the method could find the damaged power combiner during flight test activities.