Partnership with SDSU on Project HALO

Partnership letter from SDSU for Project HALO (Hyperband Adaptive Link, Omnidirectional)

One challenge in space applications is the sharing of information while in flight. That only works if each link carries an antenna capable of holding the connection channel to its peers. No such antenna exists today that meets all the requirements at once.

Conformal array antenna concept.

The requirements are demanding. It has to transmit in nearly every direction, because rockets or satellites spin and the geometry between vehicles changes constantly. It has to work across a wide range of radio frequencies, from S band up through Ka band. And it has to keep working through the sheath of ionized air, which normally blocks radio signals entirely.

Dreamscape's approach is to print flat antenna rings directly onto the curved skin of the missile and let software do the rest. Instead of building the beam direction, polarization, and frequency into the physical hardware, all of those become settings the radio can change in real time. If a jammer appears, the link moves to a different frequency or a different polarization. When the vehicle enters or travels in the atmosphere and the plasma sheath forms, the radio shifts to a higher frequency band that punches through it. This last point rests on measured flight data from NASA reentry experiments in the 1970s, not on speculation.

San Diego State University's Antenna and Microwave Laboratory, led by Dr. Satish Sharma, builds and measures a physical test piece in its anechoic chamber and compares the measurements against the computer models.