Patent ID: 8098612

Claim:
For an integer N that is greater than one and an integer M that is greater than N−1, a satellite broadcasting system includes: a satellite segment comprising: a downlink broadcast antenna array including N elements; a wavefront de-multiplexer having at least N outputs configured to drive corresponding ones of the N downlink broadcast antenna array elements, and M inputs; a frequency-domain de-multiplexer unit configured to demultiplex and frequency-convert uplink signals; and an uplink receive antenna configured to receive the uplink signals; a ground segment comprising: at least one digital beam forming (DBF) processor configured to multiply a content data stream with an N-component beam weight vector (BWV) to create an N-component product vector; a wavefront multiplexer having at least N inputs driven by corresponding ones of the N-component product vector, and M outputs; a frequency-domain multiplexer unit configured to frequency up-convert and modulate the M outputs of the wavefront multiplexer to generate the uplink signals; and an uplink transmit antenna configured to transmit the uplink signals; and a user segment comprising at least one user receiving at least one beam from the downlink broadcast antenna array of the satellite segment.