Antenna selection to minimize pointing requirements

Traditionally, when designing a satellite communications system, an allowance is made in the link budget for pointing loss. The earth station's antenna size is then selected to achieve the desired gain margin, In this article, a different approach called antenna optimization (AO) is proposed, where the objective is to ensure that the antenna pointing requirements arc kept to a minimum. For a given transmission system, Own all parameters except the diameter of a single parabolic antenna are held constant, the allowable off-boresight movement is maximized when the budgeted pointing loss is 4.3 dB.(1)