In contested environments adversaries deliberately degrade communications through electromagnetic interference, jamming and the denial of GNSS. Conventional radio links — wide-beam and easy to detect — are precisely the links that fail first, and the bottleneck is rarely the radio; it is the antenna. Today an operator must choose between a cheap wide-beam antenna that is trivial to jam and intercept, and an expensive electronically-scanned phased array that is heavy, power-hungry and costs tens of thousands of pounds per aperture — and which concentrates thousands of fragile active components exactly where an attack strikes first.
PHANTM removes that trade-off.
Instead of the thousands of active transmit/receive modules that make a conventional phased array expensive, power-hungry and fragile, PHANTM uses a low-loss waveguide layer combined with a thin actuated layer that sets the relative phase pattern across the aperture mechatronically. The beam is steered by trimming that phase pattern. The result is a directional, high-gain antenna with the conformality and low profile of a flat panel, the steering of a phased array, and a manufacturing cost closer to a printed structure / parabolic than to active electronics. The passive phase shifters can operate through U-, V- and E-bands, with a roadmap towards 120–160 GHz. Because the aperture scales with wavelength, the higher the frequency the thinner the antenna becomes.
A narrow, steerable pencil beam concentrates power at the intended receiver and spills little to an adversary — inherently low-probability-of-intercept and far harder to jam. High directivity rejects off-axis interferers on receive.
Being almost entirely RF-passive, with a frequency-selective waveguide that rejects out-of-band jamming energy, and a passive directional geometry, PHANTM is inherently robust against high-power electromagnetic effects, EMP and laser attack — resilience built into the architecture.
No large bank of active T/R modules means dramatically lower-cost, -power draw and -heat than an electronically-scanned array of equivalent aperture — giving around 40–50% DC-to-RF efficiency.
Thickness is a function of wavelength: the higher the frequency, the thinner it gets. Around two centimetres at the bottom of the band, and thinner as you climb — until the supporting structure matters more than the aperture itself. Potentially conformal (with pop-up feed), so it can sit on a drone wing, a vehicle roof, a mast or a stratospheric platform without the size, weight and power penalty of a dish or a thick array.
PHANTM’s millimetre-wave capability provides enormous bandwidth — of the order of 10% of the centre frequency.
A low-loss passive-waveguide and single-feed distributes the millimetre-wave signal across the aperture; a thin actuated RF-passive layer imposes and trims a controllable phase pattern that steers the beam — without the dense bank of active modules that dominates the power, thermal budget and cost of a conventional array. PHANTM scans to around ±45° or more; the host platform may additionally provide slow, coarse pointing — airframe attitude on a drone, a vehicle’s heading, or a simple mount on a fixed link — PHANTM provides the fast, steering phase, with cell spacing kept tight enough to suppress grating lobes that would otherwise leak energy toward an adversary.
The architecture scales across frequency, underpinning U-, V- and E-bands, with a roadmap towards 120–160 GHz that keeps the technology within spectrum that low-cost commercial hardware does not yet reach. Full performance data and the actuator design — the core intellectual property — are shared only under a mutual NDA.
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