Patent ID: 8779977

Claim:
An electro optical scanning antenna comprising: at least one laser; at least one control circuit coupled to said laser; at least one optical modulator coupled to said laser; at least one radio frequency microwave source coupled to said optical modulator; an optical loop circuit coupled to said optical modulator and having at least one tunable optical time delay device, an optical amplifier coupled to said tunable optical time delay device, a fixed time delay line element connected in series to both said optical amplifier and said tunable optical time delay device, and a two by two optical coupler coupled to said optical loop circuit and said optical modulator; a time domain pulse redistribution circuit coupled to said two by two coupler and comprising a plurality of photo diodes, a plurality of radio frequency amplifiers coupled to said photo diodes, a plurality of fixed time delay lines, a plurality of optical switches coupled to said photo diodes and said fixed time delay lines, at least one control circuit in communication with said optical switches, and a plurality of antenna elements associated with said time domain pulse redistribution circuit whereby; said control circuit controls said laser in order to generate a pulsed laser output and control the wavelength of said output and said optical modulator modulates the amplitude of said optical pulse from said laser and said fixed time delay lines in said time domain pulse redistribution circuit having a time delay that is substantially equal to the time delay made by said optical loop circuit in order to distribute the series of pulses generated by the optical loop circuit and compensate for the fixed delays produced by the travel time of pulses within said loop circuit.