The paper overviews and surveys Japan's reflector antennas for earth stations and radio telescopes since the 1960's. Some interferometers for radio astronomy are included. Japanese original technologies regarding reflector antenna design and measurement are also described. There are 35 figures and 3 tables.

This paper addresses onboard processing architecture employing direct regeneration. The advantage of direct regeneration is its hardware simplicity, even though the bit error rate performance is slightly inferior to that of demodulation-remodulation scheme with coherent detection. The channel filtering schemes as well as achievable capacities are examined by computer simulation. It is found that the system with direct regeneration has advantage in channel capacity and transmit earth station e.i.r.p. for small earth stations. A possible configuration of direct regeneration onboard in future satellite systems is proposed.