A use of ultra wideband (UWB) technology within spacecrafts has been proposed with a view to partially replacing wired interface buses with wireless connections. Adoption of wireless technologies within the spacecrafts could contribute to reduction in cable weight (and launching cost as a result), reduction in the cost of manufacture, more flexibility in layout of spacecraft subsystems, and reliable connections at rotary, moving, and sliding joints. However, multipath propagation in semi-closed conductive enclosures, such as spacecrafts, restricts the link performance. In this paper, UWB and narrowband propagation were measured in a UWB frequency band (from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, the full-band UWB approved in the United States) within a small spacecrafts and a shield box of the same size. While narrowband propagation resulted in considerable spatial variations in propagation gain due to interferences caused by multipath environments, UWB yielded none. This implies that the UWB systems have an advantage over narrowband from a viewpoint of reducing fading margins. Throughputs exceeding 80 Mb/s were obtained by means of commercially-available UWB devices in the spacecraft. Path gains and throughputs were also measured for various antenna settings and polarizations. Polarization configurations were found to produce almost no effect on average power delay profiles and substantially small effects on the throughputs. Significantly long delay spreads and thus limited link performance are caused by a conductive enclosure (the shield box) without apertures on the surfaces. Even in such an environment, it was found that delay spreads can be suppressed by partially paneling a radio absorber on the inner surfaces. More than 96 Mb/s throughputs were attained when the absorber panel covered typically 4% of the total inner surface area.

In this paper, we present a sequentially rotated array antenna with a rectangular patch MSA fed by an L-probe. Since it's important to decrease couplings between patch elements in order to suppress the cross-polarization level, rectangular patches with aspect ratio of k are adopted. We investigate the cross-polarization level of the sequential array and discuss the relationship between the cross-polarization level and the mutual coupling. As a result, the bandwdith of the antenna element is obtained 14.6% when its VSWR is less than 1.5, and the directivity and cross-polarization level of a 4-patch sequential array are 10.8 dBic and 1.7 dBic, respectively, where k=0.6 and the patch spacing of d=0.5 wave length. These characteristics are 5.6 dB and 5.8 dB better than the corresponding values of a square patch sequential array antenna.